The travis-perl helpers are great. If you haven’t heard about them before, what they do is let you test your Perl projects on Travis with a much wider range of Perls than Travis provides natively. They also run your tests from the perspective of end users. What that means is that if you’re using Dist::Zilla or another module builder tool, the helpers will build a distribution tarball, then unpack that and test it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been using the phrase “First release upon an unsuspecting world” as the Changes entry for the first release of all my CPAN modules. Thinking about this, I cannot remember where this came from. I don’t think that I invented it, but maybe I did. I do have an idea every once in a while. But I feel like I got the idea from someone or something else.

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 I’ve followed, so I thought it would be good to write it up.

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.

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 travel there once a month.

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!

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.

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.