Perl Maven - June 2014

A month ago the Perl Maven Pro subscription was one year old. I outlined some plans back then but unfortunately I could not fully implement them last month.

I managed to publish only 5 articles on the Perl Maven site. 3 of them were for the Pro subscribers.

On the bright side, all 3 already came with a screencast, and I am a lot happier with the quality than I was ever before. The 3 articles and screencasts are the following:

So how did I spend my time that I could not produce more articles/screencasts?

Contract development work

I spent 12 days at a client writing Perl Dancer, JavaScript, HTML5/CSS3. I enjoyed myself very much and also learned a lot. I have been providing development services for this company on and of for 5 years now. I like the people there and the tasks are interesting. This time I had to build several in-house web applications to allow people to categorize images and then to provide statistics about the categories. I also built an implementation for the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. That was basically a Single-Page application where the only interaction with the server is fetching a JSON file describing the task and submitting the results with a simple form. I did not have write any back-end code here.

Beyond being interesting it is also very tiring. These workdays at this client usually are 11-12 hours long + 1-2 hours driving. That does not give much time or energy for anything.

Vacation

In addition there was Shavuot which meant two vacation-days for the kids. We spent one of the days at my cousin in a Kibbutz. I really like being there.

Perl TV

I spent an enormous amount of time adding videos to the Perl TV, including 80 videos from 4 years of the London Perl Workshop: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and all the 67 videos from YAPC::NA 2014. I also watched, featured, and shared quite a few videos and the site got 7,500 visits in June. Oh and Eitan Schuler has started to collect Perl-related presentations in German, and even made some improvement to the site.

In addition I tried to promote the Perl TV on blogs.perl.org, and on perlnews.org with limited success. People seem to still mostly link directly to YouTube instead of the PerlTV.

TPF grants

I spent (or maybe wasted ?) a day collecting information about The Perl Foundation Grants. and then posted about it. It seems that some people were unhappy about it pointing at the existing pages about running grants and completed grants. The funny and sad thing is that I did not know about those pages. I don't recall anyone talking about them when they were created (I think in 2011) or ever since.

YAPC::NA

I also ranted about the lack of communication by the YAPC::NA 2014 organizers. I probably should have not do that publicly but, I already was angry that they did not organize the trainings in time and thus I could not attend. And then the organized the trainings but in a way that most people could not attend. (it was too late to get the employers sign them up and to change the flight tickets). When I noticed the live streaming of YAPC (which btw was great idea and great implementation) just 10 minutes after I sent out the Perl Weekly that was the last straw. It was very frustrating that no one mentioned this feed on blogs.perl.org so I did. It just got a bit out of hand and turned into a rant.

EduMaven

I also published quite a few additional pages on the EduMaven site. Mostly about Python and testing with Perl.