I’ve begun work on my Pod-munging grant. My first real task has been reviewing perlpodspec, which is the most useful document one can read about writing a Pod parser. It’s a bit unstructured, but for the most part it’s clear, unambiguous, and useful.

Oh. Actually, Pod::Weaver is already on the CPAN. It’s just not all that useful yet. I had been using it as part of Dist::Zilla for a while, but it needed more work to be useful for my applications. Some of it was design work and some of it was implementation work, and rather than sort it all out, I took my early, crappy proof of concept work and released it as its own thing, PodPurler. It wasn’t extensible, tested, or… well, it wasn’t very good. It just happened to do what I needed.

One of the reasons I was keen to use GitHub for hosting controlled files at work was because of the slick chrome that GitHub puts on a lot of Git operations. It meant that some of our less technical users could still benefit from using a DVCS without having to understand a lot about remotes or merging. Unfortunately, it turns out that the most important piece of this chrome is totally unsuitable for use by non-technical users.

If I were going to was introspective, I’d say that one of my best and worst qualities is my love of designing something for ages before building it. I think it tends to make my end product better, but it also means that the product languishes. Right now, that’s the state of Email::Sender::Simple.

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons off and on since I was in elementary school. I remember my brother’s collection of carefully painted miniatures, although mostly I remember the ochre jelly. I’ve been writing computer programs for almost as long. Both hobbies have had large gaps in continuity, but they’re still things I like and things that get a lot of my time.

It’s been nearly two months since my last update on writing new method resolvers in Perl, and not much has happened. I was very disheartened to learn that while it was easy (for some value of “easy”) to make this work:

I’ve been using Dropbox (that’s a referral link, but they’re free) for a good while now. It’s a online storage service that syncs folders online with other computers. Your file is local and in the cloud and on all your other synchronized computers. It is also very, very fast, and runs on Win32, OS X, and x86 Linux. I use it for a bunch of stuff, including synchronizing my notes on my D&D game.

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.