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Hi Folks

I've finally added POD to the 21 modules of Business::Cart::Generic which were missing it.

Cheers
Ron

As part of my deployments to DotCloud I want to run my test suite. Having found my code directory (which I didn't find documented anywhere) this was straight-forward:

dotcloud run namespace.name -- 'cd /home/dotcloud/code/ && prove t/*.t'

Lots of exciting things have happened with MetaCPAN since I posted the last update. The most important development was the announcement that Moritz Onken's Google Summer of Code proposal for MetaCPAN was accepted. Moritz had already made a huge impact on MetaCPAN before his proposal was accepted and this gives him even more time to devote to improving both the front and back end of MetaCPAN.

I've always thought of this project as a marathon rather than a sprint, but with the rate things have been happening lately, I may be forced to re-evaluate. I'd like to see us get the maximum benefit for the Summer of Code grant. In order to do this, we still need some volunteers to dig into our big list of open issues. The more issues we can clear up, the more of his time Moritz can devote to some of the meatier parts of his proposal, like module tagging, comments etc.

They say you should write what you know. Lately I've spent some time exploring the job market. I've been doing this to some extent for years as I worked to recruit new employees to Rentrak. In the past year, I've seen the volume of open positions explode as the economy starts to recover. This has created something of a low pressure zone "outside". Plenty of companies are seeing turnover in the past year as employees get sucked out by one of the very many external opportunities.

This is good for developers. Even if you're not actively looking for work, your employer will feel market pressure to improve your working conditions. They want to be sure that you're not sucked out the door. If you are actively looking for work, then there's a veritable smorgasbord of options out there. If you don't see something you like today, just keep your eyes open. If you'd like to be actively looking but are not sure where to start, then the rest of this blog post is for you.

Hi Folks

At the very least, this is worth reading up on: Less CSS.

The less refers to factoring out common logic.

Cheers
Ron

As David Precious has written recently, ambs (Alberto Simões) has joined the core Dancer development team!

Ambs has been working closely with us for a while now and it just made sense for someone this motivated and responsible to be a part of the core.

Welcome ambs, and congratulations! :)

Finally I've uploaded pictures from the Perl QA Hackathon 2011, which took place in Amsterdam from 16th-18th of April.

Photos

It was a very enjoyable event - good company, good code, good beer. Thanks to Philippe Bruhat (BooK) for organizing it; to Booking.com for their offices and sponsorship; and to Vienna.pm for their sponsorship, which also helped to cover my travel and accommodation costs.

Perhaps "old job" isn't entirely accurate as I'm still working there for another week and change. I guess "current job" is more appropriate.

Ron Savage asked what that job was. Well, I'm happy to share that. I'm working at Rentrak. Yes, they're hiring. I've been there going on eight years now. If you're in the market for a perl job in Portland, Oregon USA, then look them up.

Perks: tons of smart coworkers, serious about test-driven development, huge repos of code in much better shape than is typical out there (from what I've seen and from what I've heard from others), various degrees of XP and agile influence (which practices are in play depend on which team you land on... and may change over time), etc. There's more behind the link above.

If that strikes your fancy, submit your resume!

Note: that "huge repos of code" bit also means that much of the learning curve is learning your way around perl_lib/RTK. Rentrak has hired plenty of non-perl programmers who do great and contribute novel perspectives. Picking up perl is nothing compared to picking up the existing code. So, if you're a great hacker of some other stripe don't let a lack of perl experience stop you from applying.

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on a Survey Plugin for Labyrinth. The plugin is used within the YAPC Conference Survey system, which has now been running for several YAPC events over the last 5 years. I had promised to try and release the complete survey site last year, but with it being a Labyrinth based site setup, I didn't want to release it without releasing Labyrinth first. Now that's done I can concentrate on getting the Survey Plugin and the complete survey system on CPAN.

This year I will be running the YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe surveys as per usual. However, this year I am delighted to say I have also been asked to handle the survey for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop too. Hopefully if all goes to plan, this will provide the test bed for many other workshops to provide surveys.

So I read this post complaining about Mojo deprecating 5.8 support.
As far as I understand, there are 3 groups of people:
1) People using shared hostings, sometimes without the shell access at all; their problem with the old perl can't be solved, they just should migrate to another hoster.
2) People who use perlbrew and install all dependencies either into ~/perl5/ or maybe even them right into project/ with local::lib
3) People who use a native packaging system.

I myself belong to the third group.
First, because it's how things are done at my $job.
Second, because I believe this is the right way to do things, although I understand that many people think otherwise.

In short:

Perl debugger is awesome. Komodo IDE makes it even more awesome and can play with the guts of a Plack web-app while the web-app is running on a web server. And now all of this now works on Windows too, by updating Plack and applying a tiny patch to Komodo.

Recently I wanted to do some Dancer development on Windows. For me web development means making use of some fairly powerful tools in order to remove delays and increase the turnaround speed. Sadly the state of the stack under Dancer, as well as one of these tools hampered my efforts, leading me to fix them. In following I will lay out the tools, the needed fixes and my web development workflow.

I gave notice at my old job this weekend. It's a time of change. Perhaps one of the changes will be that I blog. Time will tell.

I haven't been posting recently about the Perl projects I'm currently working on, so over the next few posts I hope to remedy that.

To begin with, one of the major projects I've been involved with for the past 8 years has been CPAN Testers, although you can find out more of my work there on the CPAN Testers Blog. This year I've been releasing the code that runs some of the websites, specifically those that are based on my other major project, Labyrinth. Spearheading these releases have been the CPAN Testers Wiki and CPAN Testers Blog, with further releases for the Reports, Preferences and Admin sites also planned. The releases have taken time to put together mostly because of the major dependency they all have, which is Labyrinth.

Today I came home to read this: Mojolicious 1.3 Deprecated Perl 5.8.x support..

This makes me real sad, and here's why. Probably 90+% of all low cost shared web hosting providers still have Perl 5.8.x installed. I know Perl 5.8 is 10 yrs old, but go convince them to upgrade. There's no way to upgrade it, even on request. Absolute most of the ones I know run CPanel as a front end for the clients, and don't provide shell access. CPanel these days, though, is happy to install any CPAN module for you in one click, and it's really cool comparing to the alternative -- contact technical support with request to install it for you, if that is even an option.

Perl hacker Phillip Smith taunted us about the lack of Perl support; but more than our investor’s money, the real keys to the Perl stack have been the very insightful feedback and ideas of another major contributor to the Perl community: Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.

Sometime last week, while I was basking in the glory of my thirty-eight birthday, I got the best birthday present ever. “A beta account on dotCloud to try out their new Perl support,” you ask? Nope. The real gift was getting called a ‘Perl hacker’ in the same sentence as Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.

Seriously, though, a lot happened in the last week, and I was too busy slacking off to catch it until now.

For starters, dotCloud announced support for Perl (also on HackerNews) on their PaaS platform (thanks, Miyagawa! And, congrats on the new gig!). This is great news, and the Perl community has been quick to kick the tires; real Perl hackers have already tested several Web application frameworks on dotCloud:

DotCloud is a second generation Platform-as-a-service provider with
multiple languages and databases support. DotCloud recently shipped
Perl stack with PSGI web application support. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, who
works for the company as a software engineer, explains how to develop
your PSGI based web applications and deploy it to DotCloud.

DotCloud - http://www.dotcloud.com

Miyagawa on CPAN - http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/

Miyagawa's blog - http://bulknews.typepad.com/

Announcement posted via App::PM::Announce

RSVP at Meetup - http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Perl-Mongers/events/17570183/

(Note: open the post to see the indicators. blogs.perl.org doesn't show them on the summary page)

Indexing the whole CPAN to the beta version of MetaCPAN just finished. Here is one example of what you can do with the data available from MetaCPAN:

This is rafl's activity over the last 24 month.

And the activity of the Plack distribution.

If you want to include these indicators on your homepage, copy paste the following code:

For distributions:


<object data="http://beta.metacpan.org/activity?res=month&distribution=Plack" width="170" height="22" type="image/svg+xml" />


For authors:


<object data="http://beta.metacpan.org/activity?res=month&author=FLORA" width="170" height="22" type="image/svg+xml" />


(Note: author name must be all upper-case)

All uploads:


<object data="http://beta.metacpan.org/activity?res=month" width="170" height="22" type="image/svg+xml" />


Right now the width, height and number of month is hard-coded. Feel free to fork and fix that at https://github.com/CPAN-API/metacpan-web (relevant files are template/activity.xml and lib/MetaCPAN/Web/Controller/Activity.pm).

My talk at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga has been accepted:

It's quite hard to write cross-platform CPAN modules, especially when you use XS to interface with C libraries. Luckily, CPAN Testers tests your modules on many platforms for you. Come see how CPAN Testers helped me to create a fully portable module.

I'm looking forward to the conference. You can check arrivals and departures and who stays where on the wiki if you need ideas on flights and hotels. See you there!

There appear to be a few experienced Perl devs who still insist that there's nothing wrong with Perl's built-in object-oriented programming. You bless a reference and do everything manually. Stealing from twitter user @kaesees, I can now explain their opinion in two words: Stockholm Syndrome.

The biggest event for CPAN Testers last month was undoubtably getting caught up in the Amazon EC2 outages in North Carolina. In order to cope with fluctuating demand, the HTTP API to the metabase is hosted on an EC2 instance. While perhaps the architecture needs some revision to ensure the instances are better prepared in the event of failure, the set-up has worked pretty well for us so far. Although we don't see the millions of hits other sites do, we do see enough submissions that we want to be able to accept all without a problem. Thankfully the downtime has only affected those testers who do not use Chris Williams' metabase-relayd, which is able to stockpile reports, waiting until the API responds. Many thanks to David Golden for working with Amazon to get us back online. Reports are now flowing again, and with the initial flood peaks contained, the remainder of the ecosystem is getting back to normal again.