Perl QAH and MetaCPAN

By Ranguard on April 24, 2016 8:02 PM

This year was my first Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon, and even then I could only make 2 of the 4 days. I now wish I'd been to everyone ever, and for the full time!

I've been working on the MetaCPAN project for over 4 years, taking on the puppet master/sysadmin/development VM builder type role, even though that's not really my day job. So after all this time to actually meet Olaf Alders and the recently joined Mickey was a great pleasure:

MetaCPAN team hard at work at the #Perl QA Hackathon. Empty seat is for @clintongormley, sadly missed #perlqah2016 pic.twitter.com/ON8CpA09IH
— Neil Bowers (@neilbowers) April 22, 2016

We have been working towards a massive upgrade of Elasticsearch (from 0.2 to 2.3!) which will give us clustering and all round general improvements. This has been a long long project and being able to sit together and plow through issues was fantastic. We kept a overview of what we wanted to get done, and there are a lot of ticks on there.

There is still more, but it's now close!

I mentioned to everyone that I could help with speeding up websites, the cpantesters team wanted to know more, as of this morning they are now using Fastly so the site should be quicker to access around the world. But this should also give some other long term offloading benefits that they are now working on.

Paul Johnson and I also discussed various aspects of http://cpancover.com/, the first of which will be for the MetaCPAN infrastructure to act as a backup of his data so if his box goes down it doesn't take a week to recover. There is also a plan to link to the results from the MetaCPAN site.

I also met an amazing designer and she is now helping on several projects... more on that another time.

Thanks to Wendy for amazing Strawberries and support, Neil and the others for such fantastic organisation and everyone else who attended that made it such a successful event.

I'd also like to thank Foxtons, my work for sending me (as of writing we are hiring!) and also all the other sponsors for making such an amazing and productive event possible:

FastMail,
ActiveState,
ZipRecruiter,
Strato,
SureVoIP,
CV-Library,
thinkproject!,
MongoDB,
Infinity,
Dreamhost,
Perl 6,
Perl Careers,
Evozon,
Booking,
Eligo,
Oetiker+Partner,
CAPSiDE,
Perl Services,
Procura,
Constructor.io,
Robbie Bow,
Ron Savage,
Charlie Gonzalez,
Justin Cook,