The QA Hackathon (QAH) is a chance to spend 4 days with thirty or so
other people who care about the CPAN toolchain.
I went with a list of things I wanted to work on, but spent a lot of
my time working on other things that came up during the QAH.
I've come back with my batteries recharged, fired up for another year.
I was a bit trepidatious about this year's QAH, as there were a number of
group discussions planned, and some of the topics had already generated
some heavy discussions beforehand. The discussions were all very
productive though, and I think one of them will have a major impact.
David Golden needs special mention,
for his excellent chairing of these sessions.
The things I worked on:
On the first day Kenichi Ishigaski
asked if could provide some kind of caching feature for PAUSE::Permissions
as that would speed up CPANTS.
This resulted in the preload feature, released on the first day.
Encouraged by this, ISHIGAKI suggested two more features,
which resulted in 2 further releases on the second day.
On the first evening I commented to
Clinton Gormley that I always
find it hard to get my head around the query syntax for
Elasticsearch,
when writing queries for MetaCPAN.
He offered to give a talk on it, which was very helpful.
Also, Clinton looks nothing like his avatar.
I participated in two of the group sessions about CPAN and the toolchain.
I talked to RIBASUSHI one evening,
to try and understand his main concern with respect to CPAN.
I pondered it for the next day, then spent time scribbling on paper to
try and come up with a model for talking about it, and distilling out
a sequence of issues. Riba and I went over it again, and then I went
through it at the start of the final group session.
One of the key pieces from this was the notion of the
river of CPAN.
I really enjoy this sort of work: coming up with models to help
talk about things, identify issues and then start thinking about solutions.
I adopted Time::Duration and did a developer release to fix its
outstanding issues. This was as a direct result of thinking about
up- and down-stream dependencies, and caring for the dists you rely upon.
I did some work on the tools I use to manage
the PR Challenge.
I didn't do anywhere near as much on this as originally planned,
because I wanted to maximise the value got from working / talking
with people.
I built a spreasheet of distributions with various bits of metadata,
as input to the NYC perl hackathon.
Had a chat with WOLLMERS about interfaces to / for
CPAN Cover. We planned to have another chat,
but there just wasn't enough time for everything.
I had some things I wanted to talk to
Paul Johnson about, mainly related
to CPAN Cover. But somehow I ended up offering
to write a design doc for Devel::Cover instead.
We had a braindump session where Paul explained and showed various things.
I wrote the first part, but sadly
Paul was ill on the last day so we couldn't follow up.
Thanks to WOLFSAGE, who explained various things about the Perl core.
Talked to Olaf Alders
about an idea for MetaCPAN. He told me to implement
it and directed me to a video of one of his talks.
So far I've watched the talk :-)
I keep wanting to contribute something to MetaCPAN, so hope it will be this!
I added many things to my todo list, and have plenty of things to work
on in the coming year. I'm already looking forward to next year's hackathon.
I also ate various nice cakes, saw at least some of the sights,
and showed
ricochet robots
to RJBS and WOLFSAGE.
Thank you to Tina Müller, who organised the hackathon,
with support from Andreas König.
The locations of the hotel and venue (Betahaus) were perfect,
with a great café nearby for breakfast.