For quite some time now, most distributions uploaded to the CPAN include the file META.yml. This file was introduced by Module::Build, and describes the contents of the distribution. It helps the PAUSE indexer and other tools figure out what the distribution is and contains without a lot of analysis.

At long last, I’ve begun really tying together a number of things all meant to be used together. So far, it’s been a huge success and I’m really happy with it. They are:

Just over a year ago, I complained about the complexity of Git tutorials found online. My complaint was something like this: /I have no damn idea how Git works, and I’m using it just fine. Stop suggesting that people need to understand how all these things work and just explain the commands./

This list was inspired by my buddy Marcelo, who made a similar list. These are not in any particular order.

I didn’t really know who this Vincent Pit character was until a couple years ago when Variable::Magic showed up. It was pretty cool, and then I’d see him saying crazy cool things on the p5p IRC channel. At some point I said, “Hey, Vincent. I bet you’re just the guy to convince to make it possible to localize something in a higher scope.”

I gave up on index cards for OmniFocus about a year ago. OmniFocus was pretty easy to deal with, and it meant I didn’t need to carry around index cards and a pen. Not too much later, I gave up OmniFocus for Hiveminder. Hiveminder was available from anywhere on the network, and its IM-based interface was fantastic.

Some time ago I wrote an entry about RCN’s dumb password questions. Today, I got to deal with this crap again. I tried to reset my password and saw:

As I recently explained in an email to the Dist::Zilla list, Pod::Weaver is on hold while I’m too busy with other priorities. This has been a holdup for Dist::Zilla, as its Pod::Weaver integration is my big need.

Building email messages is a pain. Even if you use a library to build the message string for you, you have to know a lot of crap and pay attention to a lot of details. If you know what those details are, it’s a pain. If you don’t know what they are, you don’t feel any pain until later, when you find out all the ways things went wrong.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on our internal library for building multipart email messages from templates. Email::MIME has been stabbing me in the face much of the time.