This year Rob Kinyon and mst convinced me to do some speaking at YAPC. I ended up doing three forty minute talks. The DBIx::Class one was certainly the easiest, but also the one I was least invested in. I didn’t write DBIx::Class and it’s a big enough project that the slides nearly wrote themselves.

I also did a talk on DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler. I am a little frustrated with how this talk went down. I am confident that DBICDH is an excellent piece of software that can do some really cool things and I kinda botched the end of the talk (very abrupt.) I wouldn’t call the talk a failure; it had a great turnout and at the very least I got to discuss features with jnapiorkowski, which was fun.

My third talk was about DBIx::Exceptions. It was hard for a couple reasons; first off DBIE isn’t actually done yet. That certainly is not conducive to talking about something. Second, what it ultimately does really isn’t that complicated. The module is almost entirely a function of doing some research. So while I think that the subject is good and interesting, I don’t think it warrants a whole 40 minute talk. I actually had a long discussion with Rob about exceptions in general and he strongly supported the point of view that exceptions in any language are fundamentally flawed. I’ll turn that into a blog post at some point.

I finished all three of the talks in less than forty minutes; I think that was a combination of me talking too fast (DBIC + DBICDH) and not actually having enough content (DBIE.) I would have done better were I less nervous, which should be less and less of a problem as a I practice technical speaking more. I actually did a lot of presentations in college and rarely had these issues, but in college I almost never spoke about software I wrote and my talks were usually from 10 to 20 minutes long. Another thing that I feel is important is that I need to try to add humor to my talks. The talks that are the most engaging are also the ones that are entertaining. I’m not sure I how I could work in jokes etc, but I need to try to do that next time.

In other news, I’m pretty worn out in general from YAPC. I just need a break. So while I will do bug fixes and whatnot for my existing modules, and I still hope to release DBIx::Exceptions very soon, I’m going to try to chill out for about a month before taking on any of the other large ideas I have in mind for the future. Or at least I won’t start them on purpose

So I just got back from my second YAPC. Again I had to leave early, but not as early as last time, so that’s good. Instead of summarizing every single talk I went to, I’d like to highlight some of my (most and least) favorites.

Day 1

Not Quite Perl (NQP) A lightweight Perl 6

I can’t help but follow this since I see Patrick fairly regularly in our Dallas.p6m meetings; which is really half Perl 5 and half Perl 6. NQP is an amazing bootstrapping language for Perl 6 that is actually already self-hosting (written in itself!!!) and can do a lot of neat things. And of course Patrick is an excellent and humble speaker, which always helps.

Take a look at the slides (linked to above, page up and page down for next and prev slides) for more information.

For a language as minimal as they could get away with it’s extremely pretty. Note: For all the talks mentioned here, slides != talk.

Plack – Perl web framework & server superglue

Plack is very cool tech, even though Perl is late to the concepts it brings us. The cool thing about the talk was that it starts off really slow and then ramps up to some really amazing middleware that just blows my mind. Miyagawa was an excellent speaker and had lots of fun little jokes in his talks too.

Fey and Fey::ORM

I was told to go to this talk by ribasushi with the sole idea of stealing ideas for DBIx::Class. I was generally unimpressed with the ORM part, but Fey is far better than SQL::Abstract it seems like. Rolsky is very adamant about having no magic in his core, which is fine, but it typically means baseline code will be ugly. It’s certainly a trade off. He has a really cool autojoin feature, which I envy but also know that ribasushi already wants to implement that to an extent. Our $rs->as_query is cool, but he has something like that for EVERYTHING, which yields some interesting results. Of course this is due to his thoughts that pretty stuff belongs in a sugar layer. He has much more powerful relationships, which I envy for now but I also know that we have a branch in progress to give us arbitrarily complex (???) relationships. It seems like he has a global schema, which is too bad, but that’s just how things work sometimes. He wants to keep per db stuff out of the core, which I can certainly see being a good thing, but I also think it’s good that we try to keep all of our per db code up to snuff, so theres a tradeoff there.

Overall I thought rolsky was very honest about the fact that Fey (and Fey::ORM) is about doing things differently due to taste and that’s completely fine. I definitely envy his SQL generation code, but I’d rather SQLA2.

Lightning Talks 1

A/B testing with Perl‎

Look around at some docs on AB testing. The stuff they did with this was amazing. Forget hallway testing. This is where it’s at for usability.

perlopquick – a quick reference for Perl 5 operators‎

Ever want to look up how //= works? Not easy. Check out perlopquick. Awesome stuff for the future of core docs.

Day 2

Perl for CS Grad Students

For this talk I have to give a little bit of background. This year it was attempted to film every single one of the talks unless the speaker explicitly said not to. Cameras et al were paid for by the conference’s budget. Of course, cameras are not all you need. You also need someone to run the cameras. It turns out that ONE MAN (his name is Krishna) did ALL of that for all five tracks. Of course the videos won’t be perfect, but if this becomes a trend it would be a great thing for all of perl.

The speaker of this talk, like probably 33% of all the speakers in general, had technical difficulties getting his mac to work exactly how how wanted with the projector. He (reasonably) got frustrated at this and the wasted time it caused. What bothers me is that krishna was setting up the camera (and mic) as he did in every room every morning and walt said, “Why are you even here?” to krishna, presumably thinking that he was staff of the college (which is of course a great reason to treat a person poorly) and continued to lash out complaining about his technical difficulties. I guess to put a positive spin on this I got to know krishna better for it and I think we all owe him a beer or curry or whatever for all of his hard work (and apparently taking abuse) for doing WAY too much A/V for one person.

The talk was ok.

Iron Mad: The Iron Man Forfeit Talk‎

This was mst’s Iron Man forfeit talk. Watch the video, it’s hilarious. I’m not sure much more can be said

perl5i: Perl 5 Improved‎

I heard about perl5i last year and I thought it was neat. Now I think it’s excellent enough that I might use it in code at work. One thing I think is very good about it is the fact that you must use a version number when using the module, because it is expressly backwards incompatible. Take a look at the module. Very fun.

Lightning Talks 2

Reframing the Death of Perl‎

This basically looked at the psychological term called “framing.” The gist of the talk: when you say “Perl is not dead” people see “perl is dead.” So instead you have to completely reframe and say “Perl is alive” etc. We ended up all yelling perl is alive and scaring prospective students that were visiting Ohio State. Awesome.

Musical Intervals and Chords

This was a talk by ology about (duh) music. Very cool stuff. I wish I could have talked with him more than I did for the few minutes that I did, and especially I wish I had discussed the music stuff with him. Unfortunately he ran out of time in his talk, but what he did say was getting very cool

How I mastered English with Perl

This was a hilarious talk by a man who moved to the US from Japan and learned some english with perl. It focused on Lingua::EN::Inflect, using CPAN as a dictionary, and adorable daughters.

Auction

Not really a talk per se, but still a fun time. Apparently the auction usually takes hours, but this only took 1.5 hours, so not really that bad, and still a lot of fun. I got some O’Reilly coasters (beer mats for you brits) and wes got the new Effective Perl book + autographs. Very cool.

Day 3

Path::Dispatcher

This talk was interesting in structure. It started off fairly slowly but got super cool as it built on itself. It made me want to start writing CLI apps. The fact that it yields such a nice API makes it hard for me to justify why I like the way that catalyst does it’s dispatching (all spread out) but I do think that different ways of doing things are valid. I would love to write some kind of text adventure game with this. Maybe I’ll use it to create a Perl tutorial game?

Cool Perl 6 you can do today

Again, this was Patrick. This talk makes me want to start writing my one off scripts in Perl 6. Unfortunately some of my more interesting “one off scripts” involve creating a DBIC schema and shoving data into an sqlite database so that I can get a feel for my data. Either way, check out the slides, very cool stuff. Also note: I downloaded and installed rakudo in the talk and actually played with it. It’s been a while since I’ve done that and I assure you it’s only gotten easier.

All in all it was a great conference. I liked it better than last year despite the stress of three (supposed to be) forty minute talks. I’ll discuss that in my next post

Do you remember when you first realized that you were not the only person with a perspective in the world? I do. I was 5ish and I remember looking into the car to the left of me and seeing another person looking at me from their respective car. I remember thinking, “This is not what it is like from their point of view.” I distinctly remember reevaluating things all day that day. I am sure that I was still just as selfish and childish as I was before that moment, but it certainly changed my point of view.

---

I am proud to announce, after three months of work, that DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler is at a point where I’d call it stable and usable. DBICDH is a much more flexible replacement for DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned. Castaway did a great job with making Schema::Versioned, and without it there is no way I would have gotten started on DBICDH, but it is my sincere hope that this will be the recommended tool instead of Schema::Versioned from now on. Rob Kinyon and mst had significant influence on the overall API and design, so it is at least influenced by Very Smart people. ribasushi helped a lot later on by pointing out poorly named methods and directories as well as helping me use SQL::Translator correctly since he knows all of its weaknesses and strengths.

Major features this has over DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned:

• Multiple files for migrations
• Perl files in migrations
• Shared Perl/SQL for different databases
• Downgrades
• Not to mention extreme customizability

So try it out today! I am looking forward to getting bug reports soon

Oh also, if it does not quite do what you want…

PATCHES WELCOME!

Woohoo! git!

I am so happy to announce that DBIx::Class has migrated to git!

If people latch on well, this should benefit is in a number of ways. The first thing is that most people should appreciate is the ability to check in to source control without needing to commit to the remote repository. Not only does this make things way faster, it also means that you can work sanely offline. A lot of people did this before with SVK, but SVK is slow and a hassle (I think) to install and setup.

Another thing that this should help is our history. I don’t mean to point out a specific person, I did this all the time with svn (it’s just the nature of the beast,) but take a look at some of these commit messages. The SVK merge messages are pretty obnoxious, but that’s not what I’m referring to. The ones that bother me are the: “Oops,” “Typo,” “Thinko,” etc. With git those can be cleanly squashed into another commit. In fact, I would recommend cleaning up your history before you push every time. This is how I do that:

That will rebase your current branch (all of it) onto master, and give you an editor that will let you fix commit messages, merge commits, and more. If people do not do this I fully intend to do it myself before I merge a branch in, if I do. And that brings me to the next point which we shall discuss.

Workflow

We toyed with the idea of setting up git such that everyone would just use github or gitorious or whatever and ribasushi and I would be in charge of merging remote branches into the DBIC master, but mst veto’d the idea in favor of a more communal approach. Basically the workflow we will use looks like the following:

1. Get a commitbit (liberal policy)
2. Clone the repo (dbsrgits@git.shadowcat.co.uk:DBIx-Class.git)
3. Make a topic branch based on what you are doing, do work on it, whatever
4. Push branch to repo
5. Ask a fellow DBIC’er to review the branch, that includes me, ribasushi, Caelum, and really anyone else with a commitbit
6. If the reviewer thinks everything is sane, the reviewer will merge the branch in; to be a bit more clear, you should not merge your own branch into master, that is the reviewer’s job
7. Delete your branch locally and remotely after everything is merged in, and work on other stuff!

A note about merges, don’t merge master into your branch. It makes for yucky history. Instead, rebase your branch onto master. Currently the thought is that anything except for master can be rebased. Of course if you and another dev are working in the branch you might want to keep that to a minimum, but at the very least you should be rebasing to squash silly commits before you push, and then when you do the final merge into master you should rebase first, so that history remains sane. Of course, the best time to rebase to fix silly history is before you push, and the best time to rebase to make it so that you are fastforwarding master is right before the final merge, so try to only do that then.

At some point I plan on writing a DBIx::Class::Manual::Contributing in the spirit of Moose::Manual::Contributing, but ours will be significantly more lax. In the meantime, just swing by #dbix-class, get your commitbit, and help out!