Hashbang.ca

If you haven’t already, read about day one.

Postmodern Module Packaging

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.

Well, YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC is over, and I had the opportunity (after getting bumped around more than a couple times) to give a lightning talk as part of the final session. I had previously done a blog post on the subject, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts with a wider audience.

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.

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.

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:

Michael Schwern talks about Perl5’s shortcomings, and explains how perl5i can overcome many of them – it is a pragma to fix as much of Perl 5 as possible all at once. While I haven’t worked with perl5i much, I wanted to talk about something Schwern talked about that resonated with me, and that’s the concept of “tribal knowledge.”

Last night, someone posed a problem in #perl-help. They wanted to have syntax highlighting in their shell for Perl code. I immediately suggested that they use Pygments – I knew about it because I’d used it before, and I had experimented with the command line tool. But I was surprised there wasn’t already a Perl solution.

chromatic identified some reasons why it is difficult to hire great Perl programmers, and then followed it up with some advice for hiring managers. They suggest a series of questions every good Perl programmer should be able to answer. I wanted to know how I stacked up.

I’m a Perl guy. I like the language a lot – how it looks, how it works… Even if it isn’t perfect, I like it a lot. But I also love things that work, and Wordpress works.

This essay was originally written in Portuguese, and subsequently translated to English. I rewrote the English version so it reads like an anglophone wrote it.

I understand that some people have problems switching from Windows to linux. Since all my friends keep telling me how great Windows is, I thought I’d try an experiment.