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!

 

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!

 

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.

 

 

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!

 

Wikified Links to the DBIx::Class::Tutorial

Several people have told me they are playing with DBIx::Class::Migration from the github repo, but have all run into the same questions.  Rather than keep repeating my answers, until I can get that code on CPAN here's a link to the wiki that has links to the internal tutorial, which you might not see due to the way github is organized.  You'll need to navigate with the brower back button for now, but this is just temporary until I can work out the patches to DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler with the author, and move this to CPAN.  Until then I hope the tutorial is useful!

Also, a link to the FAQ, which has answers to the most common error messages I am hearing about.

 

New Version of Test::DBIx::Class

Just a quick announcement, there's a new version of Test::DBIx::Class out there on cpan.  This is a bit late to be published, just needed a bit of time to fully review some pull requests (lecstor++) and I've had my mind on DBIx::Class::Migration quite a bit last few weeks.

I've been really happy to see that the last few revisions of this code have really been pushed along by great community support.  It is truly gratifying to me to know that code I've opensourced is not only useful to other, but is useful enough that other people blog about it and contribute.  This is the part of my career I enjoy the most.

How SOPA and PIPA could affect my (and your) OpenSource work

I'm blogging to say I oppose the SOPA and related PIPA acts, or anything at all like it.

I write a lot of free software, nearly all on my own time.   I give it away with the hope it helps others.  I do this because I feel that I have personally benefited from open source / free software and as a programmer that has made a lifetime career using open source I feel some sense of obligation to do what I can to help others who were in position my 15 years ago.

I wish that people working in content creation would have a more humble sense of their position in history.  No story today is unique, everyone has built upon the creative might of the ages.  Just as I have benefited from the monumental work of great programmers before me, so do the Hollywood storytellers of now benefit from from the creative genius of thousands of years of human culture.

I agreed that one has the right, if one chooses, to be paid a reasonable sum for reasonable work.  I make a good living writing the 'special sauce' for companies on top of solid open source components.  We live is a free market economy and I begrudge no one the right to make an honest living.  But the right to defend oneselves does not extend to preemptively blocking the wellsprings of human knowledge.  It seems to me that there are those in the content and human knowlege industry that would put 99 innocent people against the wall in order to shoot one guilty man.  They have an inflated sense of their own importance and an inappropriately inflated sense of entitlement.  SOPA and PIPA reflect that overblown ego.

These are the same people that would extend copyright forever.  These are the same people that have blackmailed thousands with blanket lawsuits.

For the short term, join me in opposing SOPA and PIPA. For the long term we need to kill the beast at its roots, by reducing our consumption of mass popular media products.  Personally I don't even own a TV and haven't bought a CD (or online digital media project) or dvd for years.  Think about it.

Thanks for you attention!