Modern Perl

Damian Conway Presenting in NYC Thursday, May 17, 2012

Damian Conway, one of the Masters of Perl and generally reall smart dude (don't believe me?  He's got his own Wikipedia Article) is presenting in NYC at our local Meetup.

If you are anywhere near NYC, and fail to see this, you are going to be missing out on what is sure to be a great talk and an awesome way to satisfy your Perl conference needs as are you waiting on YAPC:NA.

Be sure to head over to the meetup page and mark yourself as attending!

Live Video-stream for the 23 April 2012 Perl / Moose Meetup at Shutterstock!

The revolution will be broadcasted!

Our IT group has managed to setup a public broadcast feed for next week's meetup (which I have announced and discussed previously.)

Let me first say how much I hope this news doesn't discourage people from attending in person.  My goal here is to have a rocking house full of Perlers drinking free beer and eating free pizza.  However, if you can't come and would rather watch other people eat and drink for free, here's a link to the live feed to be:  http://www.livestream.com/shutterstockpublic

I'll also be embedding the link in a post a few days closer to the event.

This live feed is a big experiment for us, we are pretty excited about it, but like all first time things it could go wrong, so again if you want to see the presentation and can come please sign up today!

 

New Version of Catalyst-Authentication-Plugin on the way to CPAN

There's a new version of Catalyst-Authentication-Plugin heading for CPAN.  Version 0.10019 makes some changes to silence some warnings you might see if using a Moose based Catalyst.  It also adds a new included credential called 'NoPassword' which allows you to easily force authentication for a user (handy for creating administrative backdoors).

This is a small change that should not break your existing code.  Please shout out if you have any problems!

I want to thank the Catalyst community on IRC for helping me prep and promote this to CPAN.

Update on Perl / Moose Meetup, celebrity attendees

Just FYI, Stevan Little (the godfather of Moose) has graciously agreed to attend the meetup I spoke of in an earlier post.  So there's another great reason for you to attend.

I also invited Yehuda Katz, who is someone of importance in the Ruby community.  I did so after readying this blog about why I shouldn't invite him.   He hasn't gotten back to me yet.

Did I say you should come and bring you dog?  

Meetup is 23 April 2012 (just a handful of days away!)

Shutterstock hosting a Perl Meetup Monday, 23 April 2012

...And I will be giving a talk on Moose, on all the things I've learned using it, and you will get the chance to see some of my most embarrassing code (and get a good laugh at me).  Additionally I will quote Tolkien and demonstrate the relationship between the the quest to destroy the Ruling Ring and software development. 

Here's the meetup linkage: http://www.meetup.com/The-New-York-Perl-Meetup-Group/events/59990662/

We've hosted a few Meetups here at Shutterstock in the past quarter and they've gone really well.  We even hired someone at the last, so bring your resume!

And regarding spreading the word about this talk: I'd appreciate all the help I can get to let people know about this and encourage people to show up.  Bring yourself!  Bring your children!  Bring your dog!  The last two meetups we had here at Shutterstock covered Javascript projects, and we had good attendance, which has resulted in all the people playing with node.js walking around and gloating about how much more popular node.js is over Perl.  So help me shut them up!  We have 60 people at the last and I am serious about packing the house in support of Modern Perl and Moose.  We will have food, beer, a hiring manager and special bonus awards for whoever comes from the furthest point on Earth, as well as whoever brings the most people.  Plus, I think I'm an awesome presenter, so you have a reasonable chance of learning something, and a very high probability of being entertained.

I'm aiming this talk both at people that know and already praise Perl, as well as people that work at companies that need to support Perl but might not be feeling the love.  So spread the word around!

 

DBIx::Class::Migration on CPAN

This evening I stole a bit of time while on vacation to cook up a release version of DBIx::Class::Migration.  My sincere thanks to everyone that has given me thoughts and code to get me this far.

Although this is based on mature code and I've put a lot of effort into making a useful first release it is far from impossible that I've made some major goof, and as a result I am hoping / asking / begging for people to try out the tutorial and give all this a good tire kicking.  I'll be using it heavily on my next two internal work projects, which I hope will also let me shake out any issues or identify major useability gaps.

I don't plan on doing much more adversing / advocacy until I hear from others that this is working for them.  So please, try it out and don't hesitate to complain!

 

DBIx::Class::Migration and the CPAN ecosystem

One of the things I've found most gratifying while working on DBIx::Class::Migration is how in using the CPAN ecosystem I was able to engage many authors to solve bugs / issues I uncovered in shared code.  For example, I noticed a edge case in the more recent versions of YAML that got solved rapidly.  I also uncovered some issues with DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader that the author was willing to take on based on my test case.  And in DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler I worked with the author through several patch sets which solved bugs and improved the functionality.

In doing so the entire ecosystem was improved, not just the one project I am working on.  Improvements to DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler will benefit anyone using that code.  The fixes to YAML are significant since that module is broadly uses.  And DBIC::Schema::Loader is a core part of the DBIC ecosystem.

Sometimes when you go to work on a project it might feel simplier to say, "I'm going to roll it all myself." Or to just copy paste stuff.  In some ways that can be faster.  It can sometimes be a slower process to work with many authors to convince them to accept your patches.  But it is always better for the community overall.  I believe that this contract amongst CPAN authors is part of what is going to allow Perl to continue to grow and continue to be a top notch solution for application development. 

 

MooseX-Types-Paramerizable Updated on CPAN

MooseX-Types-Paramerizable

This is a small patch by contributor (chocolateboy++) to remove some unneeded dependencies and clean up the pod a bit.  If it's working for you I can't consider this a required update but it shouldn't hurt anything either.

 

 

Catalyst-TraitFor-Model-DBIC-Schema-QueryLog-AdoptPlack Updated for Trial Catalyst

The most recently released Trial version of Catalyst fixes the way the Plack %ENV is exposed to your application.  As a result, I have updated Catalyst-TraitFor-Model-DBIC-Schema-QueryLog-AdoptPlack to work with the newer version as well as maintain backward compatibility.

If you are using Catalyst with Catalyst::Engine::PSGI, it is HIGHLY recommended you update to a newer version of Catalyst that bakes PSGI support right in.  However if you are currently stuck, please let me know if this update to the querylog debug panel busts anything for you.

Great Picture of Catalyst Dispatch Flow

Was on IRC today and someone posted:

Which is a pretty handy guide to Catalyst dispatch flow.  ++ to whoever did it!