In October, for (I think) the second year, Digital Ocean ran Hacktoberfest – a campaign encouraging people to submit pull requests to Github repos in exchange for free t-shirts.

A few of us thought that this might be a good way to do a small bit of easy Perl advocacy, so we tagged some issues on Perl repos with “hacktoberfest” and waited to see what would happen.

I created a few issues on some of my repos. But the one I concentrated on most was symbol-approx-sub. This is a very silly CPAN module that allows you to make errors in the names of your subroutines. I wrote it many years ago and there’s an article I wrote for The Perl Journal explaining why (and how) I did it.

Long-time readers might remember that in 2014 I wrote an article for the Perl Advent Calendar about Perl::Metrics::Simple. I used Symbol::Approx::Sub as the example module in the article and it showed me that the module had some depressingly high complexity scores and I planned to get round to doing something about that. Of course, real life got in the way and Symbol::Approx::Sub isn’t exactly high on my list of things to do, so nothing happened. Until this October.

Over the month, a lot of changes were made to the module. I probably did about half of it and the rest was pull requests from other people. The fixes include:

Better tests (and better test coverage – it’s now at 100%)

Using Module::Load to load module

Using real exceptions to report errors

Updating the code to remove unnecessary ampersands on subroutine calls

Fixed a couple of long-term bugs (that were found by the improved tests)

Breaking monolithic subroutines down

And I’m pretty happy with how it all went. The work was mostly completed in October and this morning I finally got round to doing the last couple of admin-y bits and version 3.0.0 of Symbol::Approx::Sub is now on the way to CPAN. You still shouldn’t use it in production code though!

Thanks to everyone who submitted a pull request. I hope you did enough to earn a free t-shirt.

If you want to get involved in fixing or improving other people’s code, there’s the 24 Pull Request Challenge taking place over Advent. Or for more Perl-specific code, there’s the CPAN Pull Request Challenge.

p.s. In the Advert Calendar article, I linked to the HTML version of the results. For comparison, I’ve also put the new results online. It’s a pretty good improvement.

Also published on Medium.