For a long time, the DateTime::Locale distribution has been rather stale. It is built from the CLDR project data, which came in XML form. And not just any XML, but one of the most painful XML formats I’ve ever experienced. It’s a set of data files with complicated inheritance rules between locales (both implicit and explicit). Any data file can contain references to any other file. There are “alternate” and “variants” for various items.

In a discussion group about animal activism on Facebook, someone recently shared an article titled The Myth of the Ethical Shopper. It’s a really interesting piece about some of the problems with consumer advocacy aimed at encouraging people to buy sweatshop-free products. I highly recommend reading it. The discussion in the Facebook group was about how this piece might relate to efforts targeting consumers on behalf of animals, but I think the discussion got off on the wrong foot.

The organization formerly known as “autarch-code” is now called “houseabsolute”. I think some folks may not have wanted to transfer a repo to an organization named “autarch-code”. The new name is hopefully a little less “all about Dave”. I also changed the picture, though I really miss the old one, because I thought it was hilarious. I’ve saved it here on this blog for posterity. Am I insane? No, I’m not.

If you have a lot of distributions, you may also have a lot of .travis.yml files. When I want to update one file, I often want to update all of them. For example, I recently wanted to add Perl 5.22 to the list of Perls I test with. Doing this by hand is incredibly tedious, so I wrote a somewhat grungy script to do this for me instead. It attempts to preserve customizations present in a given Travis file while also imposing some uniformity.

In a discussion on #moose-dev today, ether made the following distinction: author tests are expected to pass on every commit; release tests only need to pass just before release I think this is a good distinction. It also means that almost every single “xt” type test you might think of should probably be an author test. The only one we came up with in #moose-dev that was obviously a release test was a test to check that Changes has content for the release.

During my Introduction to Go class last Thursday at YAPC::NA::2015, one of the class attendees, David Adler, asked a question along the lines of “why use Go?” That’s a good question, so here is my answer. Let’s start by first talking about why we use Perl (or Ruby, Python, PHP, JS, etc.). Why use a dynamic language? There are a lot of reasons, but the basic answer is that these languages make it easy to get a system up and running quickly.

I’ll be offering my new Introduction to Go class here in Minneapolis on Saturday, May 30. The cost is just $30 and I have 15 spots available. I’m offering this class at such a low cost because I want to get some feedback on it before I give it at YAPC::NA::2015. If this goes well, I plan to give this class in Minneapolis again, but I’ll be charging more, so now’s your chance to take the class for as cheaply as it’ll ever be offered!

Ok, that alliteration is a stretch, but it’s the best I could do. This blog post is a public announcement to say that my tuits for CPAN-related work will be in very short supply until after YAPC. I’m basically devoting all of my FOSS programming time to creating the slides and exercises for my Introduction to Go YAPC master class. As you might imagine, creating a one day class is a lot of work.

This year at YAPC I’ll be giving two master classes. Why am I doing this? I don’t know, I think I may be insane. But that aside, here’s some info about said classes. My first class is Introduction to Moose. I’ve been giving this class for a number of years, and it’s always been well-received. The class will take place on Sunday, June 7, the day before the conference proper begins.

Somehow people seem to keep breaking into my Netflix account. Calling Netflix achieves little. Their go to answer is to have me change my password and sign out all devices. In theory, this should keep hackers out. I’ve done this a number of times to no avail. Last night I changed the email associated with the account, as well as the password, and they’re back in tonight. Edit: Someone on HackerNews asked how I know that the account was hacked.