All that Module::Faker and Getopt work was really in furtherance of PAUSE work. When I arrived in Marlow, I had been given just request by Neil: sort out PAUSE!320, a change in behavior we’ve been slowly getting right for years now.

In 2008, I wrote Module::Faker. In fact, I wrote it at the first QA Hackathon! I’d had the idea to write it because at Pobox, we were writing a PAUSE-like module indexer for changing our internal deployment practices. It became clear that we could use it for testing actual PAUSE as well as other code, and I got to work. Since then, I’ve used it (and the related CPAN::Faker) quite a lot for testing, especially of PAUSE. At first, it was just a quick way to build a tarball that contained something that looked more or less like a CPAN distribution, with the files in the right places, the package statements, the version declarations, and so on.

One non-PAUSE thing I worked on was Getopt::Long::Descriptive. I added a small new feature. It supports something like this:

For several reasons, I had considered not going to this year’s PTS. Going was a good idea, and I’m glad I did it, and I definitely got valuable things accomplished, but the main reason I decided wasn’t the morale boost I’d get from writing code. It was Marlow, the town where the event was hosted. Marlow is Neil Bowers’ home town, and I’ve heard about quite a bit over the years. PTS was an opportunity to see it in person, to have a bit of a visit with Neil, to see the oft-praised Marlow Bookshop, and as I learned fairly late into the planning, to eat at a two Michelin star restaurant. I knew that the price of doing this would be hard work at the summit and I accepted it. Fortunately, I got to do all those things, they were great, and then the hard work was rewarding on its own. Two thumbs up.

The last time I wrote in this journal was in January, and I felt committed, at the time, to make regular updates. Really, though, my first half 2018 has been pretty overwhelming, and journal posts are one of the many things I planned that didn’t really happen. I’m hoping I can get back on track for the second half, for reasons I’ll write about sometime soon. Maybe?

It has been almost a year since my last blog post, in which I complained that Slack silently drops some messages for people using the IRC gateway. That bug was about a year old then, and it’s about two years old now. I’m still annoyed… but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to summarize what I did this year, since I forgot to post anything about it during the year.

So, imagine the following exchange in private message with one of your team members:

Every once in a while I randomly think of some friend I haven’t talked to in a while and I drop them an email. Half the time (probably more), I never hear back, but sometimes I do, and that’s pretty great. This week, I read an article about Eagle Scouts and it made me realize I hadn’t talked to my high school friend Bill Campbell for a while, so I dropped him an email and he wrote right back, and I was happy to have sent the email.

According to Goodreads, which should be accurate, these are the books I read in 2016. I meant to read more, but I didn’t.

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies! I think our selections this year had fewer losers than some past years, but probably also fewer stand-out winners.