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Issue #498 - 2021-02-08 - Perl.com is back
latest | archive | edited by Mohammad Sajid Anwar
This edition was made possible by the supporters of our cause.
Don't miss the next issue!
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Hi there I am sure you have seen the news of perl.com domain being hacked. It came as a shock to me when someone first reported it on Twitter. Initially, I thought it must be a bad joke. But then I saw a tweet from brian d foy about it. I had to believe the story then. There was so much speculation going around, not all in a good taste. If you want an accurate update on the subject then I would recommend you check out the official Perl NOC blog post. Ever thought of contributing to Perl core? I remember, during the peak of my contributions to CPAN, I came across a blog post by Dave Cross, sharing his first contribution to Perl core. As is always the case, I was so inspired by his work, so I decided to contribute as well. I found a small documentation patch to contribute. I followed the instructions about contributing to the Perl core as shared by Dave. Unfortunately, I never even received an acknowledgement. I doubt it ever made it into a release. I don't even have a record of my contribution. In short, my experience was not very nice. It kind of put me off, to be honest. The reason I am sharing this story is because I came across the latest blog post by Leonerd which was on the same topic. It brought back my not-so-happy memory but I hope and wish it inspires more people to contribute to the Perl core. New to Perl? Do you want to find out about Perl's magic? A fresh approach to showcasing the magic of Perl. It is always a pleasure to read about it. Above all, it is a very well-written blog post. Highly recommended for tea-break reading. Don't forget to share it with newcomers to Perl. What is it that a developer hates the most? I am not trying to make a sweeping statement. Believe it or not, TDD is the way forward. We all want to follow it as well but at times we find reasons to skip it. I am guilty of doing the same. But then when I come across this blog post by Curtis, I feel ashamed of myself. In the post, he is not just talking about regular testing but he has gone one level up and is talking about having your own test database. What a novel idea. I am going to re-read one more time to make sure I don't miss any vital suggestions. English, not being my first language, there is always a chance that I miss something. Therefore I always read a blog post at least twice. How many of you have ever used StackOverflow to get an instant solution? I doubt you come across many developers who don't know about StackOverflow. It is the best place to ask any tech-related questions. Many years ago, when I was working on my CPAN module Map::Tube, I got stuck and couldn't find the right solution. I went to StackOverflow for help and got a solution in no time. I was very impressed and decided to help others. I set up my account and started to keep an eye on Perl-related questions. I quickly found out there are many experienced members who know the rules inside-out that you are expected to follow when asking questions or giving answers. A colleague of mine in my office, an expert in Perl, tried his best to fit in but he gave up in the end unfortunately. What a loss to all of us as a community. My personal opinion is that it is not right place for someone new to the game with the attitude to help others. I may be wrong in my observation. Lets get back to the original point, I saw a post in the "Perl Programmers" Facebook group talking about Why does the package qualification of symbols result in less memory used, even if the symbols are imported locally?. I found Evan Carroll's response very in-depth and something that make me re-visit the basics. I remember a very famous line, "You learn something new every day". How many of you have seen the warning 'wide character in print' when running a Perl script? I have seen this many times in the past, I must admit. Dave Cross gave an exhaustive solution and explanation of the cause of this warning in this thread. This has been my reference guide for years. The reason I am talking about it today is I came across a post Perl, Unicode, and Bytes by Felipe Gasper. I wish I could explain the subject as well as he does in this blog post. This is definitely going to be my reference guide in the future Have you taken part in The Weekly Challenge - Perl & Raku before? If not, then this is the best time join the team and have fun. We are currently on Week #99. So, in theory, we will be celebrating the 100th week next Monday. I am hoping to break the record contributions of week #1. As of today, the record contributions stand at 155 (Perl, Raku and blogs) in the first week. It is within our reach to break the record with the support of 200+ members. Even if only 100 members just contribute to either Perl or Raku solutions to both the tasks, we can easily go past the 200 mark. Let us create history and be part of it. Did you watch last week "Perl Town Hall" by Will Braswell? If not then you can still watch the recordings. Have fun and enjoy !! Last but not least, take care of yourself and your loved ones. Mohammad Sajid Anwar |
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Sponsors
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If you use GitHub Actions for your CI/CD you know it doesn't treat Perl as a first class citizen. This tutorial-style post can help you learn how to deploy a prebuilt Perl environment into GitHub Actions, simplifying and speeding up your CI/CD. |
Announcements
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Articles
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by Bartosz Jarzyna Bartosz again flexing his muscles and showing a cool tool built using CPAN module. |
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by Mark Gardner Another gem of an article by Mark. Nothing new but I still find it fresh and crispy. | 
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Testing
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by Curtis 'Ovid' Poe (OVID) Curtis, once again, shared his real life experience managing test databases. Some very thoughtful insights. I enjoyed it thoroughly. | 
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Web
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by Felipe Gasper Felipe explained the secret of Unicode and Bytes with regard to Perl. |
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CPAN
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by Matija Grabnar I don't think it will come as a surprise to you but I felt like sharing as it does some magical stuff using Perl. |
Perl
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by Ildar Shaimordanov Following the principle of TIMTOWTDI, Ilder showing the power of Perl. |
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by Eugene Alvin Villar I came across a post in the Perl Programmers group in Facebook sharing that a GNU tool is written in Perl. |
Perl Weekly Challenge
The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Anwar will help you step out of your comfort zone. You can even win prize money of a $50 Amazon voucher by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one winner at the end of the month from all the contributors during that month. The monthly prize is kindly sponsored by Peter Sergeant of PerlCareers.
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Pattern Match" and "Unique Subsequence". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read FAQ page. |
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Read N-characters" and "Search Insert Position" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
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by Arne Sommer Arne once again dealing with Perl and Raku. You are going to love his discussion of the readN() task. |
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by Colin Crain Colin made the readN() task more fun by dealing with multi-bytes unicode. Highly Recommended. |
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by Dave Jacoby (JACOBY) Dave shared interesting aspects of dealing with a state hash for the readN() task. | 
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by Flavio Poletti (POLETTIX) You don't want to miss the Questions section followed by the solution. Great work. |
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by Flavio Poletti (POLETTIX) Flavio seems to have endless energy to carry on blogging on daily basis for months. The best part is that the quality is top of the range. |
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by Laurent Rosenfeld A last-minute submission by Laurent is well worth the wait. Plenty of choices dealing with the readN() task. |
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by Roger Bell West (FIREDRAKE) Roger used a state variable for the readN() task. As every week, you get to enjoy Python, Ruby and Rust. |
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by Simon Green Simon correctly pointed out that the readN() task should have been task #2 as it turned out to be harder than task #2. He nailed it in the end. |
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by W Luis Mochan Luis making use of Functional Programming to deal with the readN() task. |
Videos
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by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB) Luckily I saw the announcement by Gabor on Twitter about his live video session. I was able to attend the show with few others coming along as well. It was fun watching him playing with BDD. | 
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Rakudo
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Training
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by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB) In this course you'll learn how to write unit and integration tests in Perl so you don't have to worry that something breaks when you make a change in your code or when one of the dependencies changes or when you upgrade to a newer version of Perl. |
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Weekly collections
The corner of Gabor
A couple of entries sneaked in by Gabor.
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by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB) I am a very late adopter, people have been doing this for a long time, but finally I also started it. I started streaming while I explore new things and write code. You can see the recordings and you can follow me on Twitch (and then you can set it up to send you alerts when I start streaming). I plan to stream frequently in two timeslots. Around 08:00 UTC and 18:00 UTC. I'd love to see you follow me and join me in some of the sessions. |
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by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB) A little background from a few days ago when I was still only thinking about starting to stream why I learn and explore new things and while I develop applications or contribute to Open Source projects. Since then I reached 30 followers on Twitch. Nice start. |
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by Gabor Szabo (SZABGAB) This was my first stream and it was not kept on Twitch, but you can see it here. |
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Events
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Thursday, February 4, 2021; 6:30 PM PST |
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It will take place online between March 24-26 2021. The private ticket will be cheaper (EUR 30). People who register in time and transfer the participation fee, will get exclusive extras. |
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If your mouth is watering at the thought of joining a dynamic team and you’re a senior Perl programmer with a solid understanding of Go programming languages, our client just might set a place for you at the table. They are looking for Perl developers with commercial experience using one of Mojolicious / Catalyst / Dancer. Ready to cook up something good? Shoot us an email! |
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The client is interested in anyone with experience building web apps in Perl, using one of the major Perl frameworks. If you’re a crack-hand with Catalyst, a Mojolicious master, or a distinguished Dance, they want you. You’ll be deploying apps your work to AWS, so experience would be handy, and the company’s big on testing, so they’d like you to know your way around Test::More. |
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You’ll design and develop software solutions, optimize the backend system, help expand the TLD offer, test software, and engage in good old fashioned problem-solving for technical issues identified by clients and partners. The ideal candidate should be confident using Modern Perl, in particular happy with DBIx::Class and Moose/Moo. |
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Not all jobs are created equal. Sure, most pay the bills, but some do more. They impart a sense of purpose; when you log out at day’s end, it’s with the satisfaction that you are part of something bigger, something more important than yourself. You’ve left the world a little better than you found it, and isn’t that what life is really about? |
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Our client is an online financial services company, still rapidly expanding after 20 years of impressive growth. With a truly international presence, they’re well known globally in their niche. Looking for Perl developers with a strong background in Modern Perl – you should be comfortable with Moose and PSGI/Plack, and a solid grounding in using Perl’s testing tools. |
