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Issue #732 - 2025-08-04 - MetaCPAN Success Story
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, MetaCPAN's recent battle against mounting traffic abuse stands as a powerful testament to the resilience and ingenuity of open‑source infrastructure teams. After enduring recurring 503 outages that jeopardized service for Perl hackers worldwide, the MetaCPAN team embarked on a disciplined, data‑driven counterattack. What began with rudimentary logs, robots.txt tweaks and manual IP bans evolved into a robust partnership with Datadog and Fastly, enabling real‑time visibility and proactive defense. With the deployment of sophisticated rate‑limiting rules, user‑agent filtering, next‑generation WAF protections and a dynamic challenge system, MetaCPAN has successfully blocked some 80 percent of malicious traffic—including AI scrapers—while delivering a steady, reliable experience to legitimate users. This journey highlights how transparency, layered defense and smart automation can transform a crisis into an opportunity for stronger, more sustainable service. Mark Gardner’s return to technical blogging marks a welcome revival of one of Perl’s clearest and most thoughtful voices. Robert Acock created a mobile app, Heaven Vs Hell, written using react native and backend API's in Mojolicious. You can find it in Google Play and App Store. Enjoy rest of the newsletter. Mohammad Sajid Anwar |
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Announcements
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by Dean Hamstead (DJZORT) For all Perl Mongers in and around Sydney, please do join the next meetup. | 
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Articles
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by Leo Lapworth (LLAP) MetaCPAN.org, the essential search engine for Perl’s CPAN repository has faced months of severe traffic issues that brought the service to its knees with frequent 503 errors. |
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by Mark Gardner In Moodulinos, Mark Gardner offers a concise yet instructive journey through modern, lightweight Perl scripting by combining the time-tested modulino pattern with the expressive power of Moo. | 
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by Mark Gardner In his thoughtful response to Samuel Arbesman’s Wired piece, Mark Gardner reframes the conversation around Perl. |
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Discussion
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by Robert Rothenberg (RRWO) This post is a thoughtful prompt for Perl developers maintaining CPAN modules. |
The Weekly Challenge
The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Lance Wicks.
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Straight Line" and "Duplicate Zeros". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ. |
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Binary Date" and "Odd Letters" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
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by Ali Moradi Both solutions are compact and idiomatic Perl, ideal for scripting and competitive programming. |
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by Arne Sommer A technically sound and idiomatic Raku solution with solid input handling, effective use of Raku’s expressive syntax, and clean logic. |
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by Bob Lied The solutions are terse, elegant, and showcase modern Perl idioms. They shine in clarity for those familiar with Perl 5.42+, especially with sprintf and all. |
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by Jaldhar H. Vyas The Raku version shows off the expressive power of high-level language features (like Bag and junctions) in a tight one-liner. The Perl version is longer but more transparent to a general audience, especially Perl learners. |
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by Jorg Sommrey A technically impressive post. Task 1 is robust and production-ready. Task 2 is a brilliant regex stunt — best appreciated as a learning artifact. |
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by Luca Ferrari A well-executed and educationally valuable post. It demonstrates strong language fluency and a commitment to practical polyglot coding. Both Raku and SQL solutions are standout examples of expressive minimalism, while PL/Java and Python offer accessible, mainstream approaches. |
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by W Luis Mochan is well-written, robust and idiomatic Perl. Task 1 stands out for its thorough validation and error handling. Task 2 is concise and logically correct. |
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by Matthias Muth The post is a well-structured, technically sound and Perl-fluent exploration of the weekly challenge. It not only solves both tasks concisely but also offers insight into language features, performance trade-offs and idiomatic Perl practices. |
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by Packy Anderson (PACKY) Accurate and efficient solutions in Perl, Raku, Python, and Elixir. Demonstrates strong understanding of each language’s syntax and standard libraries. Clear separation of concerns and well-structured code snippets. |
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by Peter Campbell Smith A strong, idiomatic Perl solution to both problems—optimized, correct and pleasantly readable. This write-up reflects deep Perl familiarity and attention to corner cases. |
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by Robbie Hatley These are technically solid, idiomatic and well-documented. It balances clarity, efficiency and modern Perl features effectively. |
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by Roger Bell West (FIREDRAKE) The post delivers a compact and well-structured solution set, with a focus on language expressiveness, functional style and algorithmic clarity. It's especially valuable for readers interested in cross-language comparisons rather than Perl-only perspectives. |
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by Simon Green It delivers solid, minimal and idiomatic solutions in both Python and Perl. The implementations are exactly in line with typical weekly challenge style: clean, correct and easily accessible to other coders. |
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by Simon Proctor It is engaging, technically sound and reflects a solid grasp of Raku’s expressive features, especially hyper operators and Bags. |
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