One year of Perl Maven Pro

A year ago, on 27 May 2013, in an e-mail to the subscribers of the free Perl Maven newsletter, I've announced the creation of the Perl Maven Pro, subscription service. A few days later, on 1 June 2013 I have published the first article for the subscribers.

Now that I am looking back, I see I have not blogged about it on my personal site, and apparently I was quite silent about it in general. This is strange and needs to be changed.

So what happened in this year?

I've published 52 pro articles, together with 101 freely accessible articles. Originally I planned to publish 1-2 articles a week, but most of the time I published less than 1 a week. In the last month, after I noticed what a huge back-log I have, I added 12 articles in the Pro section closing the gap to the 1 article / week. I also planned to make a few screencasts, but I think I have not made any. I have started a few times, but I was never satisfied with the result.

On the other hand, I published the first part of the Beginner Perl Maven video course that I recorded earlier. That includes more than 3 hours of screencasts and is also available to the Pro subscribers.

Series of Articles

On the Perl Maven site in general, but also in the Pro section in particular, there are plenty of articles on "random" subjects, but slowly "series of articles" are being formed. Some of the subjects that are covered include Object Oriented Perl programming either using the light-weight Moo, the Minimalist Object Oriented system for Perl, or the 10,000 pound Moose, that is called the 'post modern' Object Oriented system for Perl, but which is just a "good OOP" for Perl.

Both Mojolicious and Dancer, the two modern, light-weight web frameworks have a few articles, and so does PSGI which is the lower-level API, the glue between the web application framework and the web server.

I have started to build an application introducing Perl and MongoDB, the NoSQL database. and there is a series about Net::Server the framework to build TCP/IP servers.

Finally, there are also a few articles about asynchronous programming using AnyEvent.

Plans for the next year

Just a couple of notes, more as directions than fixed plans:

  • Increase the frequency of publishing Pro articles to about 1.5 / week.
  • Create screencasts.
  • Turn the subjects listed above into full-blown series.
  • Talk more about the Pro articles and about Perl Maven in general.

And you, if you'd like to read these articles can subscribe to become a Perl Maven Pro.