If you haven’t already, read about day one.
I began day two with “Postmodern Module Packaging” with Ingy döt Net. This was a great comparison of the current module packaging toolchains, and a good introduction to a philosophy Ingy calls “Acmeism.”
I doubt my recounting will be anywhere near as colourful as Yanick’s, but I think it’s worthwhile to share my experiences at YAPC::NA 2011.
Last year, I stumbled across http://presentingperl.org and discovered Yet Another Perl Conference, and the other hackathons, meetups, and workshops that the Perl community organizes all over the world. I immediately wanted to attend, but I wasn’t able to arrange to go. This year, I’m lucky to be working at DRDC for the summer, and they’ve given me time off to attend YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC.
Perl programmers are probably all aware of the utf8 pragma, which turns on UTF-8 in your source code. This is actually a stumbling block for new programmers, who might think that utf8 makes your filehandles use UTF-8 by default, or automagically turns incoming data into UTF-8, and ensures outgoing data is all UTF-8 as well. Sadly, that’s not the case.
However, one of the great things about perl5i is that it turns on Unicode. All of it.
This post is really a request for advice. I’m sure there must be a solution out there, I just haven’t found it yet.
Imagine you have a module that pulls in a bunch of prerequisites. You want to watch those prerequisites (and maybe all the way down the the dependency tree) for test failures. Maybe you also want to be notified of new releases. You might even want to try extracting the most recent section of the changelog.
Kent Frederic’s recent post about Dist::Zilla minting profiles was a great overview of the subject, but because I try to follow best practices, I was struck by the section “A word on namespaces.”
Kent recommends that if you’re making an author pluginbundle, you should name it Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::Author::$CPANID. This extra bit of namespacing makes life easier for many people in many ways. I was immediately convinced that he was right, and moved my author stuff into appropriate author namespaces.
I was late to join the job search process for my first co-op work term, but I was invited for several interviews. One of the most interesting jobs I applied for was a specific project with Defence Research and Development Canada. One of DRDC’s task groups is building a fake submarine for training purposes. The sub has mocked systems ranging from a sheet of paper saying “here are some buttons” up to a sophisticated computer simulation of real submarine systems. They were looking for someone to do the simulated sonar system. The project involves everything from soliciting requirements, finding and analyzing off-the-shelf software products (including FLOSS!) to meet those requirements, installing & integrating the system, doing quality assurance, and documenting the entire process.
Update: Git 1.7.0 now supports “sparse” checkouts (quick overview).
Richard Fine has an excellent blog post discussing why it’s time to stop using Subversion. I was struck by the similarities between his reasons for leaving SVN in the dust and mine:
When I wrote 1App::perlhl1 a few weeks ago, I was mostly concerned with getting it working. I picked colours more-or-less at random, and I noted that I planned to tweak them to achieve better readability. I’d like to do some hallway usability testing – if you’re interested, please try cloning my git repository and playing with the branches. master has one colour scheme, and I created colour-2 and colour-3 to test two more schemes. Try them out & let me know what you find most easiest to read. If you want to play with the colouring yourself, I’d be happy to accept whichever one people find best. Thanks!