Community Diary - 2012-06-23
What is this? A random collection of notes from the course of a week in the perl community. No central idea should be expected or required.
Keynote reactions
Over the past week I've heard a variety of reactions and responses to schwern's YAPC::NA keynote.
The most common one has been that it was a brave, bold and excellent thing. I do, largely, concur with this, but with a few small caveats.
A number of people felt that it was overly downbeat; I disagree. While schwern has grown somewhat detached from the main spaces within which projects are co-ordinated and misses the technical diversity of most of the Modern Perl movement, social diversity still needs to be explicitly encouraged - there might still be people I haven't given a commit bit to yet!
As for exploring more dimensions of diversity than he did? Ok, re watch it replacing "diversity" mentally with "inclusivity" or "pragmatic feminism" as preferred. Now it's an excellent talk, right?
Mostly though, schwern made the point right up front that we all have blind spots and being the scruffy white guy on the stage probably means that you have more than your fair share.
We need reminding that the people we haven't already successfully included aren't around to be asked why. Think you can do better? I look forward to seeing your talk next year!
Dancing in the aisles
Over in the Dancer community, we've been discussing what we need to do to get to Dancer 2. While I guess once I get back from FPW I need to give sukria a report on what architectural fixes I think are required, we've some much bigger hurdles than my fecklessness.
Firstly, documentation. We need newbies and power users to review the current documentation, submit tests for anything you spot not covered, and then check to see if it works on Dancer2 - if it doesn't, we'll need your help to decide whether to fix it, or deprecate that behaviour in the version 2 API.
Secondly, plugins. Dancer would be nothing without its extension namespaces so we need authors and users to check whether things still work and start the porting process.
Thirdly, bug triage. Not all things in the github issue list are bugs. Some may be mistakes by the user, some a lack of documentation, some real code bugs. When you have a minute, please look at the open issues list and add suggestions, ideas, requests for more information, or if you want to be a true hero of Dancer pull requests with proposed test cases or documentation fixes.
Fancy helping out but not sure with what? Drop by irc.perl.org #dancer and sukria or sawyer or bigpresh or dams or ambs will figure it out (and if none of the real core are around, I'll try :).
A new IRC game
We periodically get people in chat.freenode.net #perl asking for help with what we suspect is a black hat script.
We regularly ask people to paste complete code because sometimes we need to help them find the bug before we can help them to fix it.
Combine the two: Ask for complete code to find out what they're trying to run, and make bets in irc.perl.org #perl (which is a social channel rather than a technical channel) on what sort of black hat rubbish it's going to be ... or if they'll /quit without showing us.
Sadly, so far the FYIQ option seems to be the winner, which just isn't as much fun.
Happy perl hacking ... next installment in something vaguely like a week.
-- mst, out.