I write software for a living, and because some of it powers publicly available services, I have real people bitching about it, so I try my best not to just rant furiously about software. I know there are people behind it.

I’ve pushed some changes to the Dist::Zilla repository to implement a simple first-pass at autonumbering of versions. After careful consideration – one might say pathological consideration – I have set the default format to x.yyDDD0 where x is an arbitrary integer, yyDDD is the two digit year and the three digit day of year and 0 is literal.

About two weeks ago, Max reported a bug with Email::MIME::Encoding related to its handling of QP and line breaks. QP and line breaks provide a totally insane problem that I talk about in my upcoming OSCON talk. It’s a mess.

I have been obsessing over how to number versions since I first started writing code for a living, around 2000. Nothing is satisfactory. I’d really like to make a decision and stick to it across all my code, and I’m pretty close to doing that.

I am an idiot.

I really wanted to do some new talks this year, but no really spectacular new ideas seemed like good ones to promise. I think “Email Still Hates the Living!” will have to wait for next year. Instead, I submitted a new talk on Rx, a talk on various new email libraries released in the last year, and my long-threatened intro to git, “Git is Easy!”

Rx is my schema system for validating data in a highly extensible and portable way. It is in the same problem space as JSON Schema and Kwalify (both of which, I think, Rx exceeds), and close to RELAX NG. I wrote it last summer, and I’ve used it quite a bit since then, and I have not been unhappy with it… except for its error reporting.

At both the Oslo and Birmingham QA Hackathons, my big project was the CPAN Metabase. I’m hoping that in 2010, I’ll be working on something new, but only because I like variety – I really like the product we’ve got and I believe it can be a great tool for a lot of problems. Here’s a simple overview of what it is and how we plan to use it.

The QA Hackathon was, just as it was last year, fantastic. It felt really productive, and left me feeling really professionally refreshed and ready to try to get more things done in general. How long until I am crushed back into grist beneath the grinding wheel? Only time will tell.

I’m getting ready to write up events of the Birmingham QA Hackathon. One of the outcomes was that I ended up really wanting the device I am about to describe. Bear with me.