Few weeks ago, on June 9th-11th, I attended 33rd Degree Conference 2014 – a big Java event held in Kraków. It was my first programming conference ever, and I was stunned how awesome it was. I had a great time, met some nice people, had plenty interesting conversations and listened to many inspiring talks. I’d like to share my thoughts on 33rd Degree’s keynotes, which, as it turned out, weren’t strictly about Java or any other concrete programming language, but they concentrated on a developer – how he should work, what he should pursue, and how should he cooperate with business and management – all this as a way of achieving satisfaction and fulfillment.

Today Neil Bowers (@neilbowers) wrote a blog post titled “What happens when you upload to CPAN?” – a sneak peek at the very last part of module releasing process (when you do cpan-upload and recieve these two strange emails). Although I’ve already released few distributions, PAUSE still seems to me as a mysterious tool with design (i.e. web interface) from previous epoch¹, but somehow capable of managing over 29000 distributions maintained by over 11000 authors.

After over 7 years, a new release of Bloom::Filter is out! Thanks to Maciej Ceglowski (MCEGLOWS / @baconmeteor), who was kind enough to give me co-maint permissions. If you don’t know what bloom filter is¹, please read “Using Bloom Filters” (article written by Maciej in 2004, but still up-to-date and very interesting). Instead of writing about bloom filters, in this blog post I’d like to concentrate on Perl module release process, as a part of my personal “diving into Perl” process.

To blog or not to blog: that is the question. Or is it? I believe that today, in Web 2.0 era, everyone should share the knowledge, exchange thoughts, make the world better place, etc. (see previous post about blogging). Yes, it may sound a bit idealistic, but I’ve always wanted to have a personal blog about programming and stuff I do, because I think it can make a difference for someone. In my case blogging didn’t work out (until now), probably because of two assumtions I made: write regularly in Polish and serve blog on my own blog engine on my own VPS. My first try from 2009 is still out there – it was a blog engine written in Django (a Python web framework), styled with custom, rather primitive CSS and filled with very few posts. As a small, personal project it failed, but because an old Polish sentence says “humans learn from failures” (I don’t know if there’s English equivalent), I’ll write down what was wrong back then and what I’ll try to do this time.

Perlbrew is a great module. I use it on every machine – it lets me install modern Perl versions on systems which ship with ancient a.k.a. good-old perls like 5.8 or even those from previous millennium. But there comes a problem – every perlbrewed perl has a separate environment and it lacks all CPAN goodies you installed and used earlier. Plus, if you have few machines and / or like to experiment with various operating systems (like me), you have to install modules you use again and again.

To address this issue I’ve released Task::BeLike::XAERXESS. It’s a Task module which has a simple purpose – it installs a module bundle I frequently use. What’s more, because I uploaded it to CPAN, you can use install, try or modify it (the source code is on GitHub).

I’m starting a programming blog (again). I don’t know if it’ll be successful (where successful means updated regularly for me), but I’d like to begin with meta-post about what I want to have here. Since I’ve been (proffesionally) working as a Perl, Java and JavaScript developer for few years, vast amount of topics will be about these programming languages, with Perl being main one.

Short clarification here: Perl has a facinating community with really, really great developers, and if you look back to previous sentence you’ll see that I only linked to Perl webpage, contrary to Java and JavaScript. The reason is simple: