What I learned at Perl MiniConf


I attended Perl MiniConf last saturday and learned a great deal. I have had a pause account since the NYC Perl Hackathon 2015 event ( May 2nd 2015 ) and because of this I decided to take brian d foy's "Become a CPAN author in 3 hours" training. It was a very smooth and eye opening experience ( I was expecting a CPAN Module upload to be a bit more complicated).

Here's a list of things I took from brian's training:


1- The only hiccups during the class were related to Windows users who were experiencing issues with the 'make' tool and 'zip' archive programs not part of windows execution path.
2- Module::Starter # module for creating boilerplate Perl distribution
3- h2xs # same as above but with support for Perl xs code
4- prepan.org # site to discuss Perl modules ideas.
5- cpantesters.org # site to get test results on different versions of uploaded CPAN modules.
6- I've uploaded my first module: Acme::MyFirstModule::ITCharlie ( This module was uploaded for training purposes and currently doesn't have any functionality behind it.)
7- ** The road to Perl mastery requires you to make many mistakes **

#7 from that list above is very important for me. The fear of making a mistake can cause you not to try new things and I know I have suffered from this once in a while.

After the training, I ran Devel::Cover with POD::Coverage on Net::Gnats ( Thanks to Richard for teaching me how to use this ) and was tasked with updating documentation for Net::Gnats.

The Icing on the cake was towards the end where everyone shared what they hacked on during the hacking session with a live presentation and swag was awarded to those who achieved certain goals (Great Perl book reads ). It was fun to finally see some Perl6 code in action and learn about Mojo::Snoo.

Thanks to Richard Elberger, David Farrell and brian d foy ( For motivating me to make alot of mistakes ) for organizing this event.

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About Charlie Gonzalez

user-pic I blog about Perl.