Originally written for providing installable themes for my photo publishing app, App-imagestream, I wrote two modules that make it very easy to provide a basic theme for a web application in an archive. This still allows for quick customization by overlaying the contents of the archive with the contents of another archive or a directory in the file system.

Part of my motivation for the virtual spring cleaning is that I have many slow-cooking pet projects in which I try out new modules or features that have not yet passed the test of time, at least at the moment of creation. Usually, I only work on these projects when I have both, inspiration and downtime, usually right after Perl workshops. One example of such a project is a prototype of a rogue-like game named App::StarTraders (unpublished) which is intended to become a clone of Elite.

I'm a sucker for early access to free APIs. So I quickly went forward when Backblaze opened up access to their B2 storage API, and implemented a client for it, Backblaze::B2. I feel a bit guilty for releasing a module without having a use case for it myself, but instead of letting it rot on my filesystem, I'm putting it out for others to use.

In which I show the tools that I use to clean up and cut releases

In the 12 years I've done CPAN releases, I have acquired my share of experience through botched releases of modules. Much of that experience has dribbled into tools and a release process that is mostly automated to allow me to release a module at the end of a hacking session without needing any mental strength to remember things. My judgement also gets clouded when I'm fixing a module in anger, so having Perl keep me honest and preventing the more obvious failure modes is highly convenient then.

Archive::SevenZip had been laying around on my computer since a long time. 7-Zip has the great advantage of being able to read a plethora of archive formats, including ISO9660 image files. Its main use is to unzip and sort incoming downloads on my desktop machine, but I have also used it to extract files from ISO-rips of CDs and DVDs.

I'm trying to keep a list of all the features I would like in Dancer::SearchApp. These features and changes range from large (index and search video subtitle files and link to the scenes in the movie) to small (implement suggestions). Usually, I keep the list of these features in a Pod file imaginatively named todo.pod.

In 2016, there already is a module named Apache::Tika, which does some of what my module does, but doesn't allow for asynchronous communication with the Tika process, which I need.