New projects, old projects, and EOH

End of holidays (EOH) is here, and it's time to think about past, preesent and future projects. I should wrap up old qw(projects friends jobs ideas energy-spent-where) and refactor them into shiny new $_ . First of all, a little change in my blog. On the right side, there's a link to vl site, and I've set up a search bar.

Old

Projects
I've decided to leave ratfinder as is, and in case of wanting to add new features, start it from the scratch, with a more global vision of perl. I think I need to mess with some small project to apply all the recently learned stuff (Moose, git / hg , Module::Pluggable, Perl::Critic, Test::More, even KiokuDB ). Anyway, I still use ratfinder about 20 times a day, and it could be improved, I like it very much. Some ideas are:

• Use Curses::UI to make it totally console friendly
• Use Module::Pluggable to allow plugins like: LRU, playlists, exes...

Work
At work, well... I'm still doing the old projects, and until I finish my Undergrad project , I'll be on theese 3 projects of mine related to Evolutionary Algorithms.

Ideas
Ideas... lots of new cool stuff to think about, and to learn, but definately, being meerly a technical post, I'll underline 2 books that CDamian gave away (bookcrossing).

• Effective Perl Programming
• Mastering Algorithms With Perl

I was mostly after MAWP but for the moment, I've read more of EPP than the other. EPP is a very concise book, with really short chapters, teaching you little tricks or warning you against some perl gotcha. I find it really enlightening despite being a book from the late nineties.

New

Projects
I've just started a couple of new pet projects, just to have some fun with perl. One is a MasterMind game. I know there's some MM modules on CPAN, but I think it's a simple enough project to try to do in a couple of days (maybe three). After having the main structure (using Moose), I'd like to try Merelo's Algorithm::Evolutionary and write an cpu player. I will upload soon at my (currently inactive) github account.

Another project is a text installer for Vector Linux. Let's see how does it evolves, we do not know even which language will be using (python? perl? plain bash?? nah ..) . There's already an info page and mercurial repo in vlcore . The project is called vinstall-cli (oh duh!) .

Work
Let's see how everything goes, but there has been some movement in smalltalk field lately...

Ideas

Ideas for this new course are basically:

• Better managing of my time.
• Reading more than in the past year.
• Go abroad at least once.
  
• Try to convert myself into an office enabler . It's a concept I'm really familiar with, but it's the first time I see it written somewhere. It'd be great to take good profit of my profile.
• Learn some web stuff and do freelance projects.
  

There are some books I'd like to finish before starting new ones.

• Mercurial. The definitive guide
• Effective Perl Programming
• PLAI

Until I finish one of theese books I've promised myself I won't start anything else. Will I be able to acomplish my promise?


Next books I want to read (or reread):

• OnLisp
• Gödel, Escher Bach
• Extreme perl
• Mastering Algorithms with perl
  

Raimon, out.

perl wallpaper for my Acer Aspire One

Reading the usual blogs while recovering from yesterday concert, I've found a perfect wallpaper for my Acer Aspire One

Get the original (full size) pic and more at:
http://blog.newint.org/tech/2009/08/12/the-true-face-of-perl/

YAPC::EU::2010

Reset
I think I'm kind of recovering from my recent emotional wounds, and starting to
live without thinking about S. 10 times a day, and only doing it 3 times a day.

It's not that it's easy, but perl and alcohol are taking me far from my problems.

Now I know^H^H^H^H^Hfeel I can't expect nothing from noone. Circumstances always manage to
screw everything, and making me more and more sceptic about people. Closing
myself in a bubble is the way to go. Fuck off world, you won.

Perl

My first YAPC was amazing. Really amazing.
Attending the conferences was a great experience. Seeing great speakers do their presentations, that make you stay mentally online for the whole conference, while you learn new useful things was a great experience. Damian Conway, JJ Merelo, Paul Fenwick, mst and many others made the whole experience really enlightening.

I talked a while to Merelo, about Feijoada Computing, and we had some nice discussions about eodev vs Algorithm-Evolutionary . I met rafl too, and had lots of fun with all the spanish perlers.

As always, Larry's Keynote was great. Lots of references to other languages and so. He mainly talked about latest perl6 progress (how to make perl6 strict at compile time and permissive at runtime).

I assisted to some perl6 talks (Pmichaud's about hacking perl6, Jonathan Worthington's about perl6 roles in depth, Mbrends intro to perl6, and some lingthning talks about perl6). Patrick Michaud announed the release of the first official rakudo release called "rakudo star" . It will be out by spring 2010, and it won't be a complete perl6 implementation, but at least, it will be a stable perl6, that will work for most jobs. Patrick said that devs need people to write perl6 apps, to guide them on further developing.

We had lots of fun with Diego, David and Rafa (Madrid perl mongers) both in conferences and having some drinks out there. I also had a great night with BooK, brunorc, Jonathan W. , and 3 other guys (Sorry, I can't remember your names), talking about marketing perl, perl6 concurrency models and drinking warm chartreuse.

My roommate, Casiano (the one responsible for my addiction to perl) was as kind and great as always. The only uni professor ever that fed my hacking mind. Thanks Casiano!
JDelgado and Alexm, as great as always. geeks, funny, and really motivated. Theese people make you have a good time while enlightening you in many many aspects.

Thursday, YAPC was over, but I went to a Modern Perl workshop driven by mst and ash. Great introductions to DBIx::Class, Moose and Catalyst. We wrote a simple web app that translated english to LOLSPEAK. Great, isn't it?

All in all, a really great experience: coding, learning, lolcats, bets, autcions, drinks, and I'm already hoping I'll be able to go to YAPC::EU::2010 in Pisa. As Jose Castro said in the last keynote, Perl is alive and kicking, and, in fact, stronger than ever. It's our mission to spread the word, but power is ours.

Cya!

(Links will be added in near future)