Sawyer X

While I was focused on the social aspects of the PR Challenge, such as the IRC channel (opping literally everyone), the guides (wrote several), the repo (plus organization), and lately even a small parser for the web page Neil created (which will appear in another post), I still had my own responsibilities - mainly, my own PR challenge, and taking care of others' PR challenge contributions that fell under my purview.

I received Maroš Kollár's MooseX::App.

I looked at several angles: docs, bugs, major improvements (speed, practices, etc.), and big blinking "what the hell is this?" lights. Unfortunately none were available. The project was maintained well, had a really decent code-base, good practices, clear - it was terrible. :)

I emailed Maroš to ask how I could help. He emailed me back and we talked about a few options. I ended up providing the following very simple pull request.

I wouldn't say I made a major contribution to MooseX::App. I didn't. Some things are now immutable (a quality I'm close to tattooing on my body - and there's a joke there on read-write mode) and coderefs are used for values. This isn't something that affected performance, no bugs were fixed, and no features were added. The code is simply more consistent and can now avoid accounting for more variables changing in run-time. Meh.

I had planned out to do more. Maroš and I discussed a few more ideas and he updated the TODO file to reflect them. Unfortunately I had no time to do so. I had more and more projects coming in and January turned out to be far from the care-free month I had hoped it would be.

However, I did earn a new insight into meta programming with Moose - a topic I never had the need to delve into deeply. Reading other people's code (especially good code) teaches you a lot. I also had the pleasure of interacting with another CPAN author and get the sense of "we're all in this together" feeling that I enjoy so much on CPAN.

Even though my time was sparse, I enjoyed providing the ever-so-little help I did, and I look forward to my February challenge, which I hope I could contribute more to.

My next post will be about work others have contributed to me during their January PR Challenge.