The two days long conference will take place in Kiev, Ukraine. It's a great opportunity for visitors from EU and USA to meet their colleagues from Ukraine, Russia and other CIS countries. No visa requirements for most countries. And they think I am a special guest :)

by brian d foy (BDFOY)

brian d foy wants you to tell him why should *you* be the one? Out of the 8 lucky ones to get a FREE copy of the 4th edition of the Programming Perl book. As for me? I had the 3rd edition but a camel ate it. I should find a picture of that to prove it.

When building Perl on Microsoft Windows one of the biggest problems is the lack of C compiler available on the system. One solution is to use and include a MinGW with the Perl. Mark Dootson, the creator of Citrus Perl, has now packaged MinGW in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors for Windows.

by Sinan Unur (NANIS)

Created and announced by Sinan Unur.

by Jeffrey Kegler (JKEGL)

Jeffrey Kegler announced the creation of a Google mailing list for Marpa by Ruslan Zakirov.

Dave Rolsky chatted with Nicholas Clark and then came up with a graph showing the average number of committers on the source code of perl. While I am happy to see this graph, I don't think it can provide us with any deep understanding. It can be a first, and important step in trying to analyze how various things in the life of the Perl 5 Porters have changed the dynamics. Has the move to Git had a visible impact? The change to annual stable releases? The grants Dave Mitchell and Nicholas Clark got?

by Dave Mitchell

Martin Evans tells about a huge change in DBD::Oracle coming from Dave Mitchell that will provide a substantial speed-up. It's interesting to see that he suspects the debugging to have caused the slower performance in threaded perl.

by Joel Berger (JBERGER)

The Alien modules provide external libraries to Perl modules. They make it easier to install a Perl module that has a dependency outside of CPAN. The Alien::Base module is supposed to make it easier to write such Alien::* modules.

by Dave Cross (DAVECROSS)

I am not sure if the original job ad was real or a joke. Or, maybe it was created so everyone will talk about it. Dave Cross uses this opportunity to tell us the short history of improvements in development practices he saw at his clients. First it was version control, then testing, and now continuous integration. I wish he was right, but I think he was just lucky.

by Caleb Cushing (XENO)

Caleb Cushing ( xenoterracide ) shows a really simple command line script and the slightly more complex script that can automate the former. This can be used to automate any command line interface (CLI) or it can be used to test an application that has a CLI. Very useful. I usually teach some of this in my testing class as well.

chromatic argues that if something is difficult to test then you might be trying to test the incorrect thing. That you should use the real API to test instead of mock objects. (I'd rather want to see explanation when is mocking a good thing.) Finally he argues to eliminate duplication from test code. Well, yes. After all test code is just code so you probably should treat it with the same level of respect as you do with the production code.

Dominic Humphries shows us a mix of Perl, Bash and vim that allows him and his co-workers to open files without typing the full path or even remembering their exact name. Besides the actual tool, I think the capability and the drive to improve ones work environment is a very important trait employees should have.

by Tudor Constantin (TCONST)

Tudor Constantin created some Boilerplate to make it easier to start developing applications with Mojolicious and Bootstrap.

by Dave Cross (DAVECROSS)

Dave Cross, the current maintainer of XML::Feed is calling on you to help improving this module. If I am not mistaken it is used by the Ironman and I am also using it to collect news items that end up (or not) in the Perl Weekly. It probably should use XML::Liberal as an optional back-end to be able to accept feeds that don't exactly adhere to the standard. Anyone with tuits?

by brian d foy (BDFOY)

Perl v5.15.7 adds a way to create an inverted map based on the Unicode property that you want to access. Using the prop_invmap function of Unicode::UCD. See the detailed example by brian d foy on The Effective Perler.

by Carl Mäsak

Even if you don't write Perl 6 code and even if you don't like coding contests, Carl Masak makes this really enjoyable. He explains the problem, and the related issues in a very interesting and easy to read way. Maybe that's only my past as a would-be (and failed) mathematician but I like it.

Symphony is an integrated library system in which reports are written in Perl. The company selling the product now also offers 12-hours Perl training for their customers. 'Perl for Librarians'.

by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB)

This is the first public release of this experimental package. The objective is to create a package that can be used for development or on a virtual host to develop and deploy applications written in Perl. It will include every important module that regular command line or web applications might need. Your feedback would be highly appreciated.

April 14, 2012, Catonsville, MD, USA

April 14, 2012, The Hague, The Netherlands

May 12-13, 2012, Kiev, Ukraine

June 13-15, 2012, Madison, Wisconsin, USA