Sawyer X

It has been quite a while since I last wrote. I think this is how 50% of blog entries around the world begin.

I've amassed a bit of a backlog over the last few weeks, and blogging was a part of it. This is the rest of the backlog.

Dancer
Dancer is going great! We've successfully wrote all articles for our Advent Calendar. We actually even wrote a few extra. The community continues to blossom, we are seeing increased traffic in the mailing list and more and more fresh monikers, some of which are rather famous. :)
One of the interesting things I've noticed in a community such as the Perl community (which is, in core, a good thing) is that people tend to make use of developments that are done by the people they know. Dancer was written (and is currently still maintained) but people who aren't very famous in the community (maybe except for Franck Cuny - who deserves to be a superstar :) and that means many community members will not flock to Dancer by default. However, we're seeing that block slowly dispersing and it's very pleasing.

The last Rehovot.pm meeting was about Dancer. I gave a talk about it and Gabor gave a talk about trouble he had with Dancer. This wasn't about complaints but of how he understood things and what he had trouble with. It ignited future patches to SiteMap and Dancer. Pretty cool!

The PEG website is written in Dancer (which is a great honor for us) and I've put some time to help make it better. The only thing missing now is META support for non-WRAPPER Template Toolkit rendering. I'm not sure it's possible but in the worst case it can be delegated to using WRAPPER to provide it.

Also, since there was a lot of discussions on the mailing list, I missed some of it. I need to go over it. There were a few patches done following these discussions which I haven't reviewed yet and I need to do that. We're evolving to a more agile streamline of releases which means we release relatively often and fearless these days. We'll probably have a few more releases soon and might even start working on 1.3x (we already have some features for it).

Social get-togethers
In the last Rehovot.pm we decided to start organizing a pure social get-together, without any talks. It's starting with only four geeks (Gabor, Dotan, Ilan and myself) and we'll start meeting every week at a local bar and pub (which is amusing because I don't even drink), to shot the breeze and talk and geek out.

Tel Aviv.pm revival!
I've recently taken up the baton of organizing meetings of Tel Aviv.pm. This used to be a rather big group and slowly dwindled till no one attended anymore. The meetings were canceled (much like Rehovot.pm now - in which the last meeting was probably the last one for a while). I've been approved a DNS (which still isn't up, unfortunately) and static hosting. I got a graphic flyer (thanks to Miss Ferret) and an informational official invitation that I passed around to people. We're trying to get a big amount of people there. If you're in Israel, consider coming!

I need to go over peoples' questions about the meeting and continue to advertise it in companies.

Email backlog
Some of my regular correspondence has been delayed because of all of this. I need to go over a huge amount of emails, and reply to every one. Some of which requires thinking (ouch!) but I think I'll make it.

RSS backlog
I read a lot of RSS feeds. I ordinarily wake up with 100 to 200 unread items to go over. I pretty much read all of them. It starts with going over CPAN uploads, reading changes for everything I use (which isn't a small amount), reading usages of stuff I don't which I might be interested in and checking out stuff I recognize but don't necessarily intend to use.

Since this is the advent season, I have a lot more to read since I subscribed to many calendars.

Chores backlog
Lately I've been living "agile", which probably means nothing to you. Part of this (and you'll get to understand the rest, if I ever publish the post I wrote about it) is to spend every weekend cleaning, tidying and throwing away (usually translates to "giving away" and "donating") stuff I don't need or use frequently. This week I fixed up a quality home surround sound system that I'll be giving to my brother.

Books backlog
I also started reading books again. I'm spending a weekend to a week on each book. Last one was Modern Perl (see: "Modern Perl" below) and the one before that was the Donnie Darko book (which included the entire transcript of the movie). The next one is Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer. It's a birthday gift I got (along with Damnation Game by my favorite author, Clive Barker, which will be the book after). Modern Perl took me an entire week (a bit at a time) because I was really stressed for time. This week has much more stuff but I hope I'll finish Flashforward by next weekend.

Modern Perl review
I was really really impressed with the Modern Perl book. I've ordered one copy for myself and 4 others to have available at the next Tel Aviv.pm meeting, a week and a half from today. I want to write a blog post dedicated to it (or even a few). The book is better than I even imagined and truly belongs to my "must read" list from now. Any student I'll ever have from this point will have to start with reading this book.

Patches?
Like I wrote above, the PEG development brought an important SiteMap patch idea. To remove regex routes from listing and allow custom listing per route. This isn't difficult to accomplish and I can do that. I just need to find some time.
Also, Tomas Doran is now maintaining MooseX::ConfigFromFile (to which I contributed a patch to allow multiple configuration files) and has asked me to review my patch and add a test file to assure it is working (some versions were released after my patch submissions which didn't include it) and I had already received an email from Zbigniew Lukasiak that included a test for it. These people are part of the reason the Perl community is great!

That's it for now. Gotta start working!