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At The Perl Conference 2017, I gave a talk titled How to Make Your Technical Hiring Process Suck at Least 20% Less. A Bold goal, I know! Unfortunately, the video from that talk did not come out. The slides are available (hit “s” for my notes), but even with the speaker notes there’s a lot missing, since I mostly knew what I wanted to say without any notes. A few folks have asked me about this presentation or the hiring process …

So I finally gave in and moved my email to Gmail. Specifically, I’ve moved the urth.org email handling to Gmail via G Suite with my own domain. The first email reader I used was Pine, which I used for ages. Later I got real modern and switched to Alpine. I would shell into urth.org and run alpine to read my mail. This worked fine except for all the ways it didn’t. I had scripts I could pipe to that would …

If you’ve ever wanted to tell me what to do in a situation where I had to actually listen to you, well, the opportunity has finally arrived! ActiveState is hiring a new VP of Engineering/CTO (I have no idea why we can’t pick a single title here). You’d be managing all of the development teams at the company, including my team, the Languages Team. The one catch is that you’d either have to live in Vancouver or be prepared to …

I’ll once again be offering my Introduction to Moose class at this year’s Perl Conference. The class takes places on Sunday, June 18, the day before the main conferences starts. This is a one day course that will teach you all the basic Moose features. It’s very hands-on and interactive, so you’ll be writing code for about half of the class time. That’s much more interesting than listening to me drone on endlessly! The course costs a mere $150? Why …

At my last job we used Web::Machine extensively. I ended up getting comaint of this distro and the accompanying HTTP::Headers::ActionPack distro as a result. To the best of my knowledge, no one else with current PAUSE permissions is really working on these distros either. I’m no longer at MaxMind, and I don’t see myself using Web::Machine at my new position. As such, both of these distros could use some attention from someone who is using them. If you’re interested please …

I just released Log::Dispatch 2.59. This is a trial release because it replaces Params::Validate with Params::ValidationCompiler. While the tests pass I could imagine there being some corner cases that this change ends up breaking. If I don’t see any bug reports for this release I will release a non-trial in a week or so.

Being unemployed the last four weeks has been fun, except for the whole lack of income thing. But now it’s time to actually do something productive for a change. I’ll be joining ActiveState as the new Languages Team Lead, Senior Software Engineer (that’s a mouthful), managing the team that does language builds as we add a whole set of new languages to the fold. I’m looking forward to helping ActiveState grow and improve our language products in various interesting ways.

Having just spoken to one Perl friend who didn’t know that The Perl Conference Call for Papers is open, I’m thinking it’d be good to spread the word. The Perl Conference (formerly known as YAPC::NA) Call for Presentations is open. They are accepting proposals until March 6, 2017, but sooner is always better! Here’s some more info from their website: The Perl Conference is a high-quality, inexpensive technical conference that celebrates the Perl programming language. The conference is accessible to …

Having recently worked quite a bit on some testing tools, including tools to parse TAP, I’ve become intimately familiar with its shortcomings. I’m going to write these up here in the hopes that future generations of test output format developers will not repeat these mistakes. TAP is (mostly) well-suited for human consumption. It’s easy to read, and when tests fail, it’s easy to figure out what failed and why. But the simplicity that makes it easy to read also makes …

My last day at MaxMind will be January 5, 2017. For the curious, I left of my own free will. I was not laid off, fired, put into a cannon and launched into space, or NDA’d as seen on the TV show Incorporated. So now it’s time to find something else to do to fill my time and checking account. I’m open to both consulting work and full-time employment. My ideal position would look a lot like what I did …