Dimitrios Kechagias

Last year I compared the various VM types of 7 popular cloud providers mainly for Perl performance, as I was looking at workloads that we'd be using at SpareRoom - you can see that comparison here.

This year I expanded the comparison to 10 providers, and while I posted it on dev.to, I thought I'd give a heads up to blogs.perl readers, especially to the commenters of the last years' post that had suggestions I incorporated.

Today, the popular Dark Sky weather API is shutting down. I did a little write-up for non-Perl devs on DEV.to, but I thought I'd post here a couple of potentially useful modules I released to CPAN recently. 

use Weather::WeatherKit;

my $wk = Weather::WeatherKit->new(
    team_id    => $apple_team_id,
    service_id => $weatherkit_service_id,
    key_id     => $key_id,
    key        => $private_key
);

my %report = $wk->get(
    lat      => 51.2,
    lon      => -1.8,
    dataSets => 'currentWeather'
);

Of course, this API is sort of free, as it requires an Apple developer account. If you don't have one and don't want to get one, there are some alternative APIs, but for the purposes of this post I'll stick to 7Timer, via Weather::Astro7Timer. Even simpler, as it does not need authentication:

use Weather::Astro7Timer;

my $w7t = Weather::Astro7Timer->new();

my %report = $w7t->get(
    product => 'astro',
    lat     => 51.2,
    lon     => -1.8,
);

7Timer is well known in the amateur astronomy community because it offers the "ASTRO" forecast, which includes astronomical seeing and atmospheric transparency, important aspects of a stargazing forecast. I am actually donating the servers the service runs on, and I develop a free iOS client (Xasteria) for it. It has some other forecast products, e.g. passing product => 'civil' will get you a more traditional type of forecast.

I was reading recently about some significant Python 3.11 performance improvements, and I was wondering whether Perl 5 still gets significant performance improvements on each version - even though it might be more mature, thus more optimized in the first place.

…

I recently got an Apple M1 Mac Mini, half out of curiosity, half because it was exactly what I would need: I have a low end Mac just to try out things like new Xcode betas etc, like a "canary" machine. My old 2012 Mac Mini stopped getting official Apple updates, so it could no longer do what I needed and the 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD M1 mini at $699 is easily the cheapest Mac you can buy.
…