YAPC is only about three weeks away, and I have a lot of work to do on my presentation material. I’m giving three presentations: one on Perl 5.12, one on Git, and one on Dist::Zilla. The Dist::Zilla talk will also be presented at OSCON. I’ve been working feverishly to get prepared for those talks, but not by writing presentation material.

I wrote about Soulver about three years ago when I accidentally acquired a free license. This morning, I saw Marcus promoting a new version and I thought I’d give it a look.

The following is a message I recently sent to the Dist::Zilla mailing list:

I’m pretty darn cautious about upgrading stuff on servers, but for some reason every once in a while I lose my mind and say, “I’m going to do a dist-upgrade my primary workstation right before (bedtime, work, a deadline).” I did that last night.

Last night, I was making some improvements to some work code, and trying to make it easier to use in places where I wasn’t using it yet. Part of this involved allowing an important attibute to be a weak reference. I really wanted to do something like this:

Here’s the meaningless top-level lines-of-code changes performed during my grant work:

I’m very pleased to report that the last to-do item from my 2010Q1 Perl Foundation grant to improve Dist::Zilla is complete. That item was an improved dzil new command, described like this:

I think I’ve finished all the pages I meant to write for the Dist::Zilla Choose Your Own Tutorial. It covers a bunch of Dist::Zilla topics like creating a new dist, converting an existing one, and adding new behavior to your configuration. The “choose your own” format should make it easy to add new content, like a wiki, but I like the almost-linear feel of the format.

This weekend, David Golden and I holed up in the Pobox offices and worked on the final draft for v2 of the CPAN Meta specification. It’s the document that describes what goes in META.yml – or, now, META.json. This was not very exciting to many people, but we were both really excited to get it done, and hopefully the final v2 spec and support libraries will be out in a few days.

I spend a lot of time dealing with character encoding issues. Getting them just right is important and sometimes tricky, but getting them wrong makes you look like an amateur. This paragraph from a blog post about PHP and encoding made me smile.