Cataclysm: DDA Launcher CLI

I’ve been playing the heck out of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead lately. It’s a fun and challenging open source post-apocalyptic roguelike turn-based game. It’s in active development but there aren’t regular releases so you need to track the repo’s HEAD if you want to play the latest version (or a recent version). This has been a pain on Linux, and so I ended up just playing on my Windows machine using the excellent CDDA Game Launcher application.

I’m Hiring at ActiveState Again

I have not one, but two, count ’em two, piping hot positions open on the Build Engineering team I manage here at ActiveState! The ActiveState Careers page has two Build Engineer positions open, one for Linux and one for Windows. We’re going to hire two people, but we could hire two of one and not the other. That said, I would really love to bring in some Windows build expertise to this team, so if that’s you please apply today.

Come Work for Me at ActiveState, The Sequel

A while back I posted about a development position on my team. Now I have a new position open for a Build Engineer. If you take a look at the ActiveState Careers page you’ll see that there are actually two Build Engineer positions open, one for Linux and one for Windows. We’re only going to hire one person but we wanted to be open to people with different skillsets and backgrounds.

My U.S. Go Congress Trip

I just finished up my trip to the U.S. Go Congress in Williamsburg, VA. This was my first Go Congress and I find the comparison between this event and programming conferences interesting. First of all, the Go Congress has nothing to do with Golang the programming language. This is an event for players of Go, the strategy board game, also known as Baduk (Korean) or Weiqi (Chinese). The Go Congress was intense.

A Reading List

A friend recently commented on a Facebook post asking for some reading recommendations, which I then gave him (boy, did I ever!). But I realized that I don’t want it to just disappear down the Facebook memory hole so I’m reposting it here. Blogs (EA/rationalist/politics/philosophy) Slate Star Codex - EA, rationalist, lots of nerdy philosophy/political stuff. Areo Magazine - Liberal Left but not “Progressive” articles, writing quality varies but mostly good.

Making Docker Play Nice with Ferm Firewalls on Linux

I’ve been using Docker a fair bit for work at ActiveState recently. It’s quite nice and makes creating and deploying services much simpler. However, it can also be incredibly annoying when I’m using it locally on my desktop. By default, the Docker daemon (dockerd) messes with iptables in order to allow docker images to connect to the interwebs. But if you already have a firewall in place there’s a good chance that this won’t work.

Come Work for Me at ActiveState

I’m sure my legion of faithful readers all shares one dream. That dream is to one day have the great joy of working for me. Well, faithful readers, that dream could come true for one lucky person among your number. [Note to self: what’s the best emote for eye rolling?] I’m hiring for a Senior Developer position on my team at ActiveState. We’re working on an incredibly ambitious product that will make development easier for everyone who uses it.

My Perl Conference Tutorials

I’m doing two tutorials this year at The Perl Conference! On Thursday, June 21 I’ll be offering my Introduction to Moose course once again. If you want learn more about using Moose this is a great opportunity. I’d also note that most of what I cover applies to Moo, so what you’ll learn is useful in many situations. On Friday, June 22 I’m bringing back my Introduction to Go course. I did this in 2015 and then put it on the shelf as I wasn’t doing so much Go for a while.

New Year, New Theme

I was getting a bit tired of my old blog theme so here’s a new one. This new theme uses Bootstrap 4 under the hood, courtesy of the Understrap theme and understrap-child. The main thing bugging me about the old theme was the font sizes and all the boxiness of the right-hand side widgets. Whenever I’d look at my own blog I’d have to hit Ctrl-+ a few times. That seems like a bad sign.

Swimming in the River of CPAN

If you’ve browsed MetaCPAN lately, maybe you’ve noticed the new “river” indicator that’s next to distributions in listings and on individual distribution pages. See the image on the right for an example. The River of CPAN analogy was first described by Neil Bowers in 2015, though I believe it was created by a group of Perl folks at the 2015 QA Hackathon. The basic idea is that the more dependencies a distribution has, the farther upstream it is.