I don't usually take part in the Perl Weekly Challenge but one of this week's challenges caught my eye. I thought it could be a fun thing to attempt and decided to use Zydeco to help solve it.

The problem is that you're given a matrix of 0s and 1s:

You need to find any squares (equal length sides) where all four corners are 1s:

Today I released Zydeco::Lite, a re-implementation of Zydeco but just using standard Perl syntax. So for example, class { ... } becomes class(sub { ...});.

This has the advantage of much faster compile time, similar run time speed, fewer dependencies, and compatibility with older versions of Perl before the keyword API was introduced. Of course, in some circumstances these aren't important concerns, so the nicer syntax of the full Zydeco will be preferred.

Zydeco and Zydeco::Lite are both based on MooX::Press which itself is based on Moo, Type::Tiny, and other modules. I've taken the synopsis example from the Zydeco documentation and rewritten it using the different layers of abstraction.

So I like to keep local copies of my blogs.perl.org blog posts as Atom entries, but noticed yesterday that I had a few gaps in my collection. The Atom feeds offered by blogs.perl.org only have the most recent articles though, so I decided to write a quick script to scrape the posts. Luckily, I managed to get a table containing the URLs for each post I needed, so I didn't need to bother with following links to find the pages; I just needed to grab the content from them.

I thought some people might find the code interesting especially for its use of lazy attributes. This is one of those "it only needs to be used once, so making the code maintainable isn't important" kinds of projects, do bear that in mind. I've cleaned up the whitespace and added comments for this blog post, but other than that, it's just a quickly hacked together script.

Prompted by a recent question on PerlMonks, I've been thinking a bit recently on marshalling and unmarshalling Perl objects. If you're happy using Data::Dumper's format, then it's trivial, but today we're looking at JSON.

If you just want to encode your objects as JSON, that's very easy. Just add a TO_JSON method to all your classes. This can be done in a role to eliminate duplication, and in most cases can be as simple as:

The difficulty comes in going the other direction.

Technically, I already announced it, but now I've renamed it. MooX::Pression is now called Zydeco.

Moops had a memorable name, and I think the naming really helped it gain a following. MooX::Pression was just meh. So now it's Zydeco. Zydeco is a fun word and pretty short to type. It's a musical genre that blends jazz, blues, and Louisiana French Creole, and it just seemed like a good fit for a module that takes what I feel are some of the coolest features of Perl programming, and blen…