NEILB's Blog

Last night I released the first version of App::todoist, which provides a todoist script. This is a simple command-line interface to todoist.com, an online todo list service. About 11pm I realised I had an hour to get something released to CPAN, or I'd break my weekly release chain.

I went to the London Perl Workshop today. Lots of good talks and also a chance to catch up with friends. Thanks to all the organisers and volunteers (and speakers!) who helped make it such a worthwhile day. This is my short report.

I've released a first lash-up of WebService::HackerNews, an interface to the Hacker News API, which was announced earlier this week. OALDERS asked who was going to write a Perl wrapper, and by this evening no-one had.

After writing my review of modules that can load other modules, I ended up using Mojo::Loader a number of times. Not everyone is keen to require the installation of Mojolicious just to use one module, and the Mojolicious project didn't want to spin out Mojo::Loader (fair enough), so I've created Module::Loader.

I attended my first ever Perl Mongers meeting this evening, a Thames Valley PM (TVPM) tech talks session, and presented a rough first draft of a talk I've submitted to the London Perl Workshop. We had two lightning talks then random Perl chitchat at the pub.

Prompted by RIBASUSHI's blog post, several discussions, github issue threads, and a long IRC chat with MITHALDU (pro tip: don't get him started! :-), I've been thinking about Perl community. I realised that one of the things I was reacting to was the suggestion that for Perl, "IRC == community". So, what is "the perl community"?

CPAN is awesome - it's "the killer feature for Perl". And you know who we've got to thank for that? Us! CPAN is a rambling random hodge-podge of code; dozens of duplicates; variable quality of code, documentation, test coverage and run-time performance. And d'you know who's to blame? Us!

In looking at exporter modules, I've also done a bit of thinking about private functions. A comment from DAGOLDEN on my function exporter post prompted me to try and enumerate the different ways you can do private functions in Perl 5.

I've recently adopted a couple of Exporter modules, and might soon be adopting a third. This has prompted me to look into exporter modules a bit more, and now I'm working on a review of all such modules (list below). While doing this I've been playing around, creating a minimal exporter that does just what I need.

The term 'Perl community' is bandied about, but it's not always clear what it means, or the scope of it. I'm not going to try and nail it down, just talk about one aspect. When working on a new module, three different people helped me within 24 hours or so, and that felt good.