Hi there! I am surprised that after half a year of the redirecting of search.cpan.org, cpan.org still has a high Alexa rankings. Any idea, why? On another note, a few week ago I mentioned I am taking Spanish lessons via Italki. Several people already used the affiliate link to sign up, and I've even received my first credit for the referral. If you'd like to practice speaking a foreign language, this is a great way to do it! Oh, and have I already mentioned I am available to help your organization introduce test automation, refactor old code, set up a CI system and do all kinds of virtualizations. Enjoy your week! Gabor Szabo

Announcements

Articles

Perl Blogs

by Rob Lauer Rob is wondering what is the status of the new central blogging platform for Perl. There was no response (maybe because it is so hard to comment in the current bpo), but I don't think that should stop anyone from starting their own blog somewhere else. GitHub pages is a great and free way to write blog posts and Disqus can be used as a commenting engine or one could just link to a Reddit post where others could comment. Heck, one could even write a simple blogging engine in Perl 5 using AWS Lambda functions.

Untrusted Numeric Input

WYANT) by Tom Wyant If you thought \d is good for making sure your input is made out of numbers, it seem you were wrong. Tom explains that \d matches digits even if they are not ASCII digits, something that could trip your math functions. He shows a number of ways to overcome the problem. I found this an excellent post, both because of the content and because of the healthy number of links. Something many bloggers seem to forget.

Code

ack 3.0 is now in beta!

PETDANCE) by Andy Lester I always use ack when looking for code string or snippets in my code-base and I always show people how useful it is. If you have not tried it yet, do it now. It is available in Debian and Ubuntu and probably in other Linux distributions as well, and you can get it directly from the source as well.

Web

AWS Lambdas, Furl & LWP

by Rob Lauer Amazon Lambda, aka. Serverless computing, allows you to create simple functions or complex applications, hand them over to Amazon and stop worrying about the number of servers you need to run. (Instead of that there are a lot of other fun things to worry about.) Anyway, up till now only a limited number of programming languages were supported and Perl was not one of them. Now thanks to Rob you can start to experiment with AWS Lambda using Perl 5 as well.

CPAN

Discussion

Simple way to run Perltidy and Perl::Critic on code before pushing to Github?

I understand the motivation, but I don't think enforcing any tests before commit or before pushing to a remote repository is a good idea. These 'gateway tests' are supposed to protect the codebase, but I think they only cause harm. They make committing code take longer time. Even if they only use Perltidy and Perl::Critic. But actually why use those? Isn't the correctness of the code more important? I think if someone starts with those two, they will soon enforce running the whole test suite before every commit or before every push. This will make people hate committing and they will do it much less frequently. Which contradicts the whole idea of Continuous Integration and reduces cooperation. Of course if one does it to himself/herself that is their choice.

Perl 11

RPerl at FOSDEM

by Hassiba 'Bennie' Bendali FOSDEM is a great conference for Free and Open Source Software where there has been a strong Perl presence for quite a few years thanks to Liz-and-Wendy. This year the team of the RPerl project will be also around the booth. If you have the time it is worth visiting this event and if you do so make sure you drop by the Perl booth!

Perl Tutorial A section for newbies and for people who need some refreshing of their Perl knowledge. If you have questions or suggestions about the articles, let me know and I'll try to make the necessary changes. The included articles are from the Perl Maven Tutorial and are part of the Perl Maven eBook.

Perl 6

Exploring Type::Tiny Part 6: Some Interesting Type Libraries

TOBYINK) by Toby Inkster It is interesting to see how Perl, a language that lets you throw any kind of value at it and it does something with it, usually what you meant, got so many 3rd party libraries that help you restrict the type of values you accept. It shows that we like flexibility and strictness at the same time. BTW there was a discussion about the subject last week.

2019.02 Is it Spring?

byElizabeth Mattijsen ( ELIZABETH Remember to read the weekly news about Perl 6!

Other

Functions in Bash

SZABGAB) by Gabor Szabo Just a few examples on how to use functions in Bash

Weekly collections

Events

21st German Perl Workshop 2019

6th-8th March, 2019, in Munich

DC Baltimore Perl Workshop 2019

April 6th, 2019, Silver Spring, Maryland

North American Perl Conference 2019

June 2019 Pittsburgh

European PerlCon 2019

August 7-9, 2019 Riga, Latvia

Simple solutions to big problems

This one is for those who enjoy building clean, fast, simple, elegant and reliable Perl the old way

Music + Tech -> Programmer Needed

Support independent music while working with Perl

London's Trendiest Office Space - Lead and Mid-Level Perl Developer roles

This client has a workspace I’m actively jealous of!

Use Open Source Tools for a Righteous Cause (Artist Protection)

Artists—at least those outside the mainstream–must work harder than ever to protect their music - help their cause while collaborating with a fun team