Report for August and TODO for September 2012

August was a hot month and I spent a week in Germany. That started out as cool and nice and ended as too hot.

I also published 15 articles.

August Penguin

On 3rd August I participated at August Penguin (Hebrew site), the local annual Penguin festival, where Linux enthusiasts try to flock together.

I was supposed to give a talk Writing Modern Web Applications using Perl, but I managed to get Sawyer X to do most of it. Basically I tried to be funny and showed them a few pictures, then Sawyer gave his regular Perl Dancer talk. Unfortunately this was the last talk of the day and some people have already left, but in general I think it was good.

Perl 5 Maven

I published 6 articles on the Perl 5 Maven site. Some of them were a bit controversial, such as the one about CGI and sending e-mail with Perl, but as usual the one that draws the most comments is the article about editors and IDEs.

Perl 6

Apparently the Perl 6 Maven site also got 6 articles. This is quite good, especially if we take in account that I spent a week in Germany and then another 2 weeks trying to recover and get my inbox under 100 messages again.

I think the article about loops and zip was read the most.

szabgab.com

There were 3 articles. Two of them seem to be the really interesting ones:

I have a dilemma who am I really serving with the Perl 5 Maven site. The people who write new code and who can afford to use Enlightened Modern Perl or those who need to maintain old but working Perl code?

In preparation for the Perl Reunification Summit, I wrote another article trying to figure out Who is in the Perl community anyway?.

Perl Reunification Summit

I was invited to the PRS by Liz and Wendy. The Perl Reunification Summit took place between 16-19 August 2012 in the town of Perl in Germany. Near the border of Luxembourg and France. I should write more about this, but if you are interested what was it about, the best would be to read the invitation letter by Liz.

In a nutshell, the idea was to improve the relationship between the Perl 5 and the Perl 6 implementations while getting the communities closer to each other. The summit could be seen as the initiation of this process. We should see solutions appearing during the next few months.

YAPC::EU Frankfurt

Immediately after the PRS was the Annual European Perl conference in Frankfurt. Unfortunately I hurt my leg (probably already at PRS) so during the whole conference I could hardly stand on my feet. The advantage of this was, that I could talk to a lot of people. Many of whom I met the first time.

The weather was warm. The beer was cold. It was great.

Some numbers

The Perl Weekly newsletter has now 3800 e-mail subscribers and over 400 RSS readers.

The Perl 5 Maven site already gets 350-450 visitors a weekday, but it's Alexa ranking is still way up at 1,847,251.

OTOH the Perl 6 Maven site gets only between 50-100 on a weekday, but is's Alexa ranking is actually much better: 1,290,084. Maybe that's due to the peaks of 300-500 visitors a day when I publish an article. Especially when it is featured on Reddit or Hacker News.

E-books and videos

I made little progress with the new e-books and video. Specifically I learned how can I record a video on my Windows notebook.

Courses

I have scheduled two Perl courses in Tel Aviv and started to promote it. This itself took a lot of hours.

Plans

The school-year has started which gives me more time to work on stuff alone. That means hopefully I will be able to publish a few more articles. OTOH in September we have the Jewish holidays (Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur) which mean more eating (or not) but definitely school-break and lack of time to write articles.

We'll see.