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.

Almost a year ago, I wrote to p5p asking about overloading the arrow operator. Specifically, I wanted to be able to change how methods were found and invoked. My most pressing motivation was to help me deal with my undying hatred of AUTOLOAD and UNIVERSAL (and, especially, their interactions), but it had other obvious benefits. Without needing to cater to the idea of “classes are packages” you’d be free to do all kinds of horrible awesome things.

When I left home for college, I planned to take my heavily, hackily upgraded 386 (actualy a Cyrix Cx486DLC) along with me. It had two full-height ESDI hard drives, and the weird, exposed ribbon cable on the back of one broke about two weeks before I left home. I quickly sold a bunch of things I owned, begged some cash from my dad, and purchased an AT&T mid-tower (a Globalyst, which later became an NCR line). This Pentium 90MHz, marvin, lasted through most of college, and was finally replaced by a Compaq that looked good in the store but turned out to be a real pain.

Today, we tried out Greekers, the new place from Billy – the guy behind Billy’s. I don’t know whether we’ll be going back in the near future, even though it wasn’t a horrible experience.

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.