Many, many years ago, in the flower of my youth (June, 1999), I registered the urth.org domain. I can’t remember when I started hosting my own email, but it was around that time. For many years after, I had a server in my home that hosted my email, various websites, and some web applications. Eventually VPS’s became cheap and powerful enough that I ditched the home server and moved everything to the cloud (Linode, specifically).

Like so many conferences this year, RustConf 2020 was a purely virtual event. I’d already helped organize and attended The Perl Conference in the Cloud 2020 as a virtual conference earlier this year, so I knew it could work. RustConf was very different from The Perl Conference. It was just one day and one track, lasting about five and a half hours with a break in the middle. The conference schedule was incredibly detailed.

Edit: I’m now up to a 0.11 trial release. Please test that one instead. I just did a trial release of this distro. It doesn’t contain any radical changes, but I did enough tweaking to the internals that I think it’s best to make a trial release. If I don’t get any bug reports in the next few weeks I will do a non-trial release some time in August.

I will be offering my Introduction to Go class at this year Perl & Raku Conference in the Cloud. The cost is just $50, with all proceeds going to The Perl Foundation. You can register for this class using Eventbrite. This year I have the class capped at just 10 people, because this is my first time doing this online. I’ve found an online classroom solution that allows all attendees to share their screens simultaneously, so I’ll be able to virtually look over your shoulder while you’re working on the exercises .

What’s a code quality meta tool? It’s a tool that lets you orchestrate many linting and formatting tools to operate on an entire project which may contain many languages. Examples include tidyall (which I maintain), pre-commit, lefthook, husky, overcommit, and precious (my new project in this space). It’s worth noting that only tidyall and precious describe themselves as being focused on tool orchestration. The others all describe themselves as systems for managing Git hooks.

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, regularly publishes predictions for the year. Here are his predictions for 2020. I thought it’d be fun to make some predictions of my own, following the same rules and a similar format. In 2021 I’ll rate my predictive success and maybe make some more predictions. Rules (copied from SSC): all predictions are about what will be true on January 1, 2021.

Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun. First, a bit of background. Tidyall (aka Code::TidyAll) was first released in June of 2012 by Jon Swartz. It’s a code quality meta-tool that orchestrates other code quality tools. With a single configuration file you can enable many different tools for a single project. By “code quality tools” I mean both pretty printers and linting tools. Each tool is supported via a plugin, implemented as a Perl class, that knows how to talk to that tool.

As part of my ci-perl-helpers project I generate a whole bunch of Docker images. Specifically, every time I push to a branch (including master) or a tag, I make 96 images. There is one base image and then one image for each specific version of Perl (5.8.9, 5.10.1, 5.12.0, etc.) plus a blead image. For each version of Perl I build a perl binary with and without threads. Obviously the number of images will only grow over time.

If I had grandchildren … GC: “Grandpa, tell us about the plague times of 2020.” Me: “Well, I guess you’re finally old enough to hear the real story of what we lived through. It was a dark, dark time. I saw a man gut another man for a square of toilet paper. A woman burned her closest friend alive over a disinfectant wipe. If you had hand sanitizer you were a king among men.

Added on 2020-02-12: For reference, I’m 6'7" (200cm). I added BMI numbers whenever I mention my weight to clarify this. Don’t worry, I’m not promoting anything. I have no diet plan or supplements1 to sell you. At my peak weight some time in the past I weighed 305 pounds (BMI 34.4), according to the scale at my doctor’s office. As of recently (I think yesterday) I’m down to around 218 (BMI 24.