Memoirs of a Roadie

Sunshine Of Your Love

Posted on 17th July 2014

The survey results for YAPC::NA 2014 are now online.

Even we with lower numbers of attendees this year, 27% of you took the time to respond to the survey. As always, this doesn't necessarily allow us to see the whole picture, but hopefully it is enough of a cross-section of the attendees to help us improve future events. Once again we had a healthy number of respondees for whom this was their first YAPC, many having never attendeed a workshop either.

There was a bit of a mixed reaction throughout the survey. Although having read the feedback from the talk evaluations, there was a lot of positive comments, and several words of encouragement for some of the new speakers, which was great to see. Overall it seems to have been another great conference, although there are areas of communication that many felt could be improved.

I see I'll have to expand the options for the question "What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?", as firstly I would include hacking on Perl core, as part of a Perl project (i.e. a group of great people doing great work to improve Perl), but also to include a new option; I donate to one of the funds managed by TPF or EPO. During the conference I saw a few Twitter posts about contributing to some of the Perl funds, which I think came about following Dan Wright's presentation. It is great that so many have donated, big and small amounts, to the various funds. They all help to improve and promote Perl, and give us good reasons to continue putting together great conferences and workshops every year.

It was great to see any good list of suggestions for topics this year, and I hope that speakers new and old, get some ideas for future talks from them.

Lastly it does seem that the location question, really does depend where the current location is. The higher numbers last year may also indicate that Austin was easier to get to for most people, whereas a more easterly location, such as Florida, may restrict the ability to attend for those on the west coast. It would be interesting to see whether a similar opposite trend would result if the conference was held in Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah or Arizona. There must be several Perl Monger groups in those states, so if you're in one, perhaps think about balancing out the number of eatern hosting states ;)

100 Nights

Posted on 13th July 2014

100 in more ways than one!

100 #1

11 years ago I was eager to be a CPAN Author, execpt I had nothing to release. I tried thinking of modules that I could write, but nothing seemed worth posting. Then I saw a post on a technical forum, and came up with a script to give the result the poster was looking for. Looking at the script I suddenly realised I had my first module. That script was then released as Calendar::List, and I'm pleased to say I still use it today. Although perhaps more importantly, I know of others who use it too.

Since then, I have slowly increased my distributions to CPAN. However, it wasn't until I got involved with CPAN Testers that my contributions increased noticeably. Another jump was when I wrote some WWW::Scraper::ISBN driver plugins for the Birmingham Perl Mongers website to help me manage the book reviews. I later worked for a book publishing company, during which time I added even more. My next big jump was the release of Labyrinth.

In between all of those big groups of releases, there have been several odds and ends to help me climb the CPAN Leaderboard. Earlier this year, with the idea of the Monthly New Distribution Challenge, I noticed I was tantalisingly close to having 100 distributions on CPAN. I remember when Simon Cozens was the first author to achieve that goal, and it was noted as quite an achievement. Since then Adam Kennedy, Ricardo Signes and Steven Haryanto have pushed those limits even further, with Steven having over 300 distributions on CPAN!

My 100th distribution came in the form of an addoption, Template-Plugin-Lingua-EN-Inflect, originally written by the sadly departed Andrew Ford.

100 #2

My 100th distribution came a few days before I managed to complete my target of a 100 consecutive days of CPAN uploads. A run I started accidentally. After the 2014 QA Hackathon, I had several distribution releases planned. However, had I realised what I could be doing, I might have been a bit more vigilant and not missed the day between what now seems to be my false start and the real run. After 9 consecutive days, I figured I might as well try to reach at least a month's worth of releases, and take the top position from ZOFFIX (who had previously uploaded for 27 consecutive days) for the once-a-day CPAN regular releasers.

As it happened, Neil Bowers was on a run that was 1 day behind me, but inspired by my new quest, decided he would continue as my wingman. As I passed the 100 consecutive day mark, Neil announced that he was to end his run soon, and finally bowed out after 111 days of releases. My thanks to Neil for sticking with me, and additionally for giving me several ideas for releases, both as suggestions for package updates and a few ideas for new modules.

I have another quest to make 200 releases to CPAN this year, and with another 20 release currently planned, I'm still continuing on. We'll see if I can make 200, or even 365, consecutive days, but reaching 100 was quite a milestone that I didn't expect to achieve.

100 #3

As part of my 100 consecutive days of CPAN uploads challenge, I also managed to achieve 100 consecutive days of commits to git. I had been monitoring GitHub for this, and was gutted to realise that just after 101 days, I forgot to commit some changes over that particular weekend. However, I'm still quite pleased to have made 101 days. I have a holiday coming up soon, so I may not have been able to keep that statistic up for much longer anyway.

100 #4

As part of updates to the CPAN Testers Statistics site, I looked at some additional statistics regarding CPAN uploads. In particular looking at the number of distributions authors have submitted to CPAN, both over the life of CPAN (aka BackPAN) and currently on CPAN. The result was two new distributions, Acme-CPANAuthors-CPAN-OneHundred and Acme-CPANAuthors-BACKPAN-OneHundred.

When I first released the distributions, I only featured in the second. For my 100th consecutive day, I released the latest Acme-CPANAuthors-CPAN-OneHundred up to that day, and with my newly achieved 100th distribution, was delighted to feature in the lists for both distributions.