2011.08.17 in #4Catalyst 5.9 was released: (Less Code, More Plack!)
This release of Catalyst totally embraces Plack. Removes a lot of code and relies on Plack to provide the benefits. John Napiorkowski explains the importance of this release.
2011.10.07 in #11Why Perl?
The Perl Weekly readers probably don't need any convincing as to why use Perl but this article by John Napiorkowski can be a good tool when you talk to others about the language.
2011.10.21 in #13Teaching a Modern Perl Class in NYC!
John Napiorkowski is running an 8-week long Perl class introducing Modern Perl to people new to Perl. This seems like a great opportunity to send a friend of you to learn Perl on a very low cost training class.
2012.02.24 in #31DBIx::Class::Migration on CPAN
John Napiorkowski released the above module including a tutorial. I am really looking forward to trying it next week. The tutorial looks promising but it refers to a number of things you'll have to learn first, unless you already understand the difficulty in database schema upgrade and downgrade.
2012.04.16 in #39Update on Perl / Moose Meetup, celebrity attendees
The meeting is on 23 April, that's today for the readers of the newsletter. If you are in New York, check out the event organized by John Napiorkowski at Shutterstock.
2012.06.26 in #49YAPC:NA Videos Posted!
John Napiorkowski has posted links to his presentation and video recording from YAPC::NA
2012.07.06 in #50Helping Recruiters understand the Perl Community Better
John Napiorkowski, who is a long time blogger, a CPAN contributor and also a developer at Shutterstock picks up where Carla has left the post and writes about the importance - for the Perl developers and the Perl community in general - to improve our communication with recruiters. He suggested to create a FAQ on perl.org, specifically for recruiters. Sounds like a good idea, though I think there were a couple of attempts already.
2012.07.18 in #52Perl and Recruiters: Part Two
John Napiorkowski collected the earlier posts about the subject and tried to synthesise the approach the Perl.org community might need to take.
2012.07.26 in #53Announcing Catalyst Community Poll and Upcoming Town Hall
John Napiorkowski has published a 10-minute long survey about the Catalyst web framework. (It is less than 20 questions.) I don't see a dead-line so, I'd recommend you head over and fill it out ASAP, before it is closed.
2012.08.03 in #54A Quick Update On The Catalyst Poll
Surely more than 300 of the Perl Weekly readers have some opinion (good or bad) on Catalyst? John Napiorkowski is looking for both current users of Catalyst and people who have not used it yet or already left it for some other framework or even some other language. (Though I guess the last group won't read this newsletter anyway.)
2012.09.06 in #59First Draft 'Perl for Recruiters' Page on Google Docs
John Napiorkowski put together some general rules a recruiter could follow if s/he wanted to find a very good Perl developer, and maybe this could be a message to other developers: how to make it easier to find a Perl job. The problem is, that the majority of Perl developers do not participate in 'the community' and do not contribute to the open source code-base. I don't know if those people are better or worse Perl programmers than the ones who contribute. One thing is clear. It is harder to evaluate them. Assuming the evaluation is mostly about 'generated code' and not, for example 'ability to cooperate' or 'ability to follow instructions'. Certainly a subject worth exploring.
2012.09.17 in #61Understanding the Catalyst Poll: Who Answered the Poll?
As you might recall, a few weeks ago John Napiorkowski ran a survey about the Catalyst MVC. This week he started to publish the results by describing the background of the people who answered the survey.
2012.10.11 in #64Thoughts on a Catalyst Roadmap
After running the Catalyst poll, John Napiorkowski is now discussing what is Catalyst and where it is going? He explains what a 'Product Statement' is, in a way that hopefully can bridge the gap between the technology oriented people and the marketing oriented people and connects that idea to the road-map.
2012.10.17 in #65Moved Draft of Perl Recruiter FAQ to Github
Are you fed up by recruiters writing PERL? Are you a requiter fed up with the quirks of the Perl community? It is time to help John Napiorkowski improve this document that will help recruiters navigate the murky waters of the Perl community.
2012.10.22 in #66Perl Moose and ->BUILDARGS
BUILDARGS allows pre-processing incoming initialization parameters. There are cases when this works well, but as John Napiorkowski shows, there are also cases when it leads to code that's hard to understand and maintain. He suggests a couple of other solutions. For example the factory design pattern or the builder design pattern.
2012.11.16 in #69It's Time for Catalyst Advent!
A call for people to write Catalyst-related articles for the Advent calendar. Let me emphasize, that John Napiorkowski is looking for both technical and non-technical articles. For example how using Catalyst is a good business decision.
2012.12.18 in #74It Happened At MacDonalds, A Meditation
While sitting at a MacDonalds and working, John Napiorkowski, arrived to the conclusion that if he wants to be able to get people excited by Perl, he needs to be able to show things that get immediate and fancy results.
2013-05-01 in #93Perl DBIx::Class - An Awesome ORM Now With Super Speed!
A new release of DBIx::Class is out. Amongst the new stuff that it brings:performance improvements. How much performance improvements? According to some of the benchmarks, it is 20 very sweet percents faster than the previous release.
2013-05-03 in #93Perl Catalyst and the Crisis of Asynchronicity
Ah yes. Asynchronicity. Six syllables fit so send shivers down many a developer's spine. John Napiorkowski explains how much fun the Catalyst team is having with it nowadays, and ask for users' input to help trace the path forward.
2013.01.11 in #77Catalyst Advent Wrap Up And Thoughts
You missed the Catalyst advent calendar the first time around? John Napiorkowski gives you a second chance to dig into that annual Holidays gift, and as a bonus provides a best of of all previous years.
2013.01.14 in #78Worth a Consideration
The aftermaths of Stevan Little's talk at the Orlando Perl Workshop continue to be felt. Here, it's John Napiorkowski's turn to muse on what was said, and what it means for the future.
2013.03.01 in #84Catalyst Backlog for Next Release on Play Perl
The title pretty much says it all. Thanks for John Napiorkowski, the list of features for the next Catalyst release is on Play Perl, all ready for your voting and commenting pleasure.
2013.04.15 in #91Product Development, Prototyping and the Adventure on Monkey Island
That's a strange title from John Napiorkowski when he effectively explains how monkeys can help you overcome writer's block while trying to incorporate RESTful content negotiation and more flexible parsing of POST/PUT content bodies into Catalyst.
2013.05.31 in #97Catalyst Sicilian Buttercup Update
John Napiorkowski gives us a quick update on the current development cycle of Catalyst. He's also at YAPC::NA, and might organize a Catalyst hackaton. If you are there and interested, keep your ears peeled during the lightning talks.
2013.06.21 in #100Catalyst 5.9004x "SicilianButtercup" Release Retrospective
If you are using Catalyst, it can be very important to see what's going on among the core developers, even if you don't currently have the time to contribute or follow the development more closely. John Napiorkowski makes it easy with his writings.
2013.08.21 in #109Perl Catalyst "Hamburg" Development Release 002 on CPAN
If you use Catalyst, it is worth following the posts of John Napiorkowski. You can easily install it from CPAN using cpanm and try if this version does not break any of your code.
2013.08.26 in #110Thoughts On Catalyst, SOA and Web Services
John Napiorkowski covers several features that were added to Catalyst recently that can help in this aspect of the framework. Such as 'HTTP Method Matching', 'Support for nonblocking I/O', 'Parsing Common incoming Request Body Content'
2013.09.20 in #113Perl Catalyst - Hamburg Status and the Future
John Napiorkowski explains why he changed the release policy of Catalyst to have a development release after each quest has been completed: 'it would help inspire contributors since there's nothing better than to see you code live on CPAN'. So far 3 out of 7 quests for the Hamburg release have been completed.
2013.10.21 in #118Perl Catalyst 'Hamburg' Development Release 4 on CPAN
Thank to John Napiorkowski we have regular reporting in the development of the Catalyst web framework. Several improvements especially in the area of better PSGI support to enable mounting other PSGI based applications inside a Catalyst app.
2014.01.28 in #132Perl Catalyst "Runner" Development Release 5 on CPAN
John Napiorkowski describes what is in this release. As a Catalyst user it is very important that you check out this release and make sure your application works with it as well.
2014.02.08 in #133CPAN Stability++
Before every release, John Napiorkowski checks if Catalyst with all of its 117 dependencies can be installed on a clean Perl. Spoiler: it can be.
2014.03.26 in #140New Catalyst Development Branch "Ancona" Ready for Commiters
Do you use Catalyst? Are you interested in contributing to the code-base? John Napiorkowski has started the new round of development. He is looking forward to contribution in forms of patches, or comments, or at least votes on which features are more important to work on.
2014.07.14 in #156PSGI Middleware and the Future of Catalyst
John Napiorkowski offers us a glimpse of the future of Catalyst, and how it's integrating even more closely with the PSGI middleware layer.
2014.12.02 in #176Development release 001 of Catalyst 5.90080
John Napiorkowski announces a developer release with a lot of fixes related to UTF-8 and encoding. "If you never bother to test development releases of Catalyst, this is the one time you really should".
2014.12.26 in #179Perl Catalyst 5.90079 Development 004 'Holland' On CPAN
After quite a long silence, finally there is a newly announced version of Catalyst. I wonder if one could combine helping Catalyst move forward with the Pull-request challenge of Neil Bowers?
2021.10.26 in #536Valiant
John released an update which includes new validator "Scalar" with lots of improvements to the example application and many more bug fixes.
2022.12 in #596Catalyst Framework
For any of the Catalyst programmers out there interested in seeing the framework move forward, here's a PR that changes action chaining so that you can call the next action from within the action code, optionally passing and recieving arguments.
2023.08.02 in #628Modern Perl Catalyst: Docker Setup
John started blog series about Modern Perl Catalyst. If you are new to Catalyst like me then this is the good start.
