Of course I still use Perl

2011 is my most productive year yet in my "CPAN career": 495 releases (compared to 119 in 2010 and 54 in 2009). So far I have 115 distributions listed under my account (compared to around 15-20 in 2010, around 10 in 2009, and 2 before that). It really never occured to me that I would release over a hundred modules to CPAN, but all of a sudden I did. Perhaps next goal should be 1000 :)

Dist::Zilla helps a lot. I can't imagine doing manual tar and updating version numbers and README and all those distribution meta files manually for tens, let alone hundreds of releases. So thanks again to RJBS and other Dist::Zilla contributors!

Part of why I'm releasing a lot of modules this year is the refactoring of our home-grown hosting control panel application. I first wrote this application years ago (in 2001 to be exact) and it grew from a few Perl command-line scripts to a horror mix of PHP, Ruby, shell spaghetti. Only in the past two years has a real refactoring effort begun. This year's refactoring alone (since February) has resulted in around 40 new modules. I love modularizing applications into CPAN distributions because the code will get a free deployment mechanism, cloud testing, and I get to contribute to open source.

I am fairly satistifed with the results so far. A few pieces of the "platform" modules, like Sub::Spec and Setup:: family have quite materialized. A few other key pieces, like Config::Ini::OnDrugs, Data::Sah, and a web form library (yes, yet another one :) ) have not. This will be one of the main focuses for next year. And probably more Indonesian-specific modules for another project.

I'd like to do more contribution other than authoring modules, like Perl/CPAN advocation, module reviews, but I think this is secondary.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Here's to another productive and brighter year. Go Perl, Go CPAN!