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.

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 it really difficult to parse properly.

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 at MaxMind.

Have you seen my new module, Params::ValidationCompiler? It does pretty much everything that MooseX::Params::Validate and Params::Validate do, but way faster. As such, I don’t plan on using either of those modules in new code, and I’ll be converting over my old code as I get the chance. I’d suggest that you consider doing the same. The speed gains are quite significant from my benchmarks. Since I’m not going to use them any more, these two modules could use some maintenance love.

I’ve been thinking about DateTime recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Perl community would be much better off if there was a DateTime core team maintaining the core DateTime modules. DateTime.pm, the main module, is used by several thousand other CPAN distros, either directly or indirectly. Changes to DateTime.pm (or anything that it in turn relies on) have a huge impact on CPAN. I’ve been maintaining DateTime.pm, DateTime::Locale, and DateTime::TimeZone as a mostly solo effort for a long time, but that’s not a good thing.

I’ve decided to stop renewing the masonbook.com domain after next year. The new home for the book is masonbook.houseabsolute.com. Please update your bookmarks.

My employer MaxMind is hiring for two engineering positions. We have a positions for a Software Engineer in Test and a Software Engineer. If you’ve always wanted to work with me, here’s your chance. If you’ve always wanted to avoid working with me, now you have the knowledge needed to achieve that goal. It’s a win-win either way! Note that while this is a remote position, we’re pretty limited in what US states we can hire from (Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon).

I recently released a new parameter validation module tentatively called Params::CheckCompiler (aka PCC, better name suggestions welcome) (Edit: Now renamed to Params::ValidationCompiler). Unlike Params::Validate (aka PV), this new module generates a highly optimized type checking subroutine for a given set of parameters. If you use a type system capable of generating inlined code, this can be quite fast. Note that all of the type systems supported by PCC allow inlining (Moose, Type::Tiny, and Specio).

It’s not too late to sign up for my Introduction to Moose class at YAPC::NA 2016. This year’s class will take place on Thursday, June 23. I’m excited to be doing this course again. It’s gotten great reviews from past students. Sign up today. There are lots of other great courses. For the first time ever, I’m also going to be a student. I’m looking forward to attending Damian Conway’s Presentation Aikido course on Friday, June 24.