Graeme Lawton

According to the web-o-meter I’ve not posted since March, it now being November that’s really not good enough. Truth be told, I’ve not really been working with Perl much for work and in my spare time I’ve been…. working.

As it happens though I did finally make it to a NWE.pm meet this month where we planned some of the stuff for the hack day.

The plan, ambitious as it may be for a day, is to work up something similar to Heroku but for Perl apps obviously. I hope to be able to take over some of the good things I’ve learnt from the RoR community and use them on this project.

On another not, it appears that the per.ly homepage has stopped aggregating the blog posts. I’ll get that sorted!

KTHXBYE

The current state of play

YAPC::EU::2010::Pisa is just a week or so away and I thought it would be time to talk about the send-a-newbie initiative once again. (If you are unfamiliar with send-a-newbie visit the website at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org)

As I spoke about previously this initiative was organised last year by Edmund von der Burg to great effect and was taken over by the Enlightened Perl Organisation to continue the good work. This year we had 3 successful applicants and all was going well until a communications SNAFU which has resulted in just one of our “newbies” able to attend (for specific details of the communications problems please talk to me privately, they aren’t suitable for this blog).

The Newbie

So with no undue haste and grandeur allow me to introduce you to Leon Timmermans who will be attending this year thanks to the donations of the wonderful Perl community. If you see Leon at YAPC::Europe make sure to say hello, perhaps buy him a beer in the bar and make him welcome to the conference going community.
I will be unable to attend the conference this year due to my wife having given birth to our first child just four weeks ago and it being a mite too early to attend such ‘fun’ events. I will miss you all and ask you to act as ambassadors for me in welcoming Leon.

Where do we go from here?

Well, now we have completed our first year of the initiative I am taking the time to reflect on what we did and how I will be doing it differently in the future.

1. Paypal is an easy way to collect money but makes a poor location to act as custodian. Paypal is easy to use, but many people do not like/trust its services and for some donating directly to a bank account is simpler and more satisfying. As of next year the money will be controlled by the main EPO account for ease but the funds will be kept separate in the EPO records and only used for the initiative.

2. Promotion of the event (YAPC::EU) and the Initiative should start directly after this years YAPC. This will allow more time to raise awareness, collect donations and allow many more applicants to apply and discuss needs (such as visas etc.).

3. More integration with the other community groups. Promoting the initiative amongst the monger groups so local representation and support can be obtained; tighter co-operation with TPF (though they were and are amazing and donated to this years initiative); co-operation with next years organisers of YAPC and with YEF to get their support and promotion. Also I would like to see information go to colleges to people on Computer Science courses etc., so that they can be targeted for sponsorship, this will most likely be done through local Mongers again.

4. Sorting the sponsors out two months earlier than this year to try and avoid any last minute communication issue(!).

So we end our first year knowing that the initiative works and seeing a road forward to improve the program. We also have funds left over to start the ball rolling next year. Once again I will be doing the rounds, cap in hand, to companies and individuals seeking to raise cash and push out the awareness.

A round of applause…

To all those who have donated and helped out this year I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks. You are all excellent people. To everyone else I urge you to seek these people out and thank them (or buy them a beer). To the companies and organisations I offer congratulations on doing a fine job of helping to support the community and I look forward to speaking to you about doing the same again .

IronMan. The project and the hack day.

IronMan was and continues to be a project to promote the Perl programming language by encouraging a community of bloggers to post on a regular basis and offering a token reward for their efforts (link needed here). Each of these blogs is then agregated to a single point for the community and the world at large to read, and of course for the assorted search engines to index.

The IronMan hack day 2009.

On Saturday 12th December 2009, the North West England Perl Mongers gathered together at the Shadowcat offices in Lancaster for our first hack day to work on the IronMan project.

The Enlightened Perl Organisation established the IronMan project and were very keen to see an archive so that all the posts that were being aggregated could be viewed retrospectively.

It was felt that the current organic architecture wasn’t shaping up in the best way for the direction that the project needed to take so a new approach was envisaged.

Who turned up?

In person:

mst, mdk, idn, iain, fade, grim, acid2, Leigh, epitaph

By the magic of the intarweb (IRC):

castaway,

Sorry if I’ve missed anyone, it wasn’t intentional. If I’ve missed you shout up and I’ll add you on.

Someone had the inspired idea to draw a small diagram of the room and who was sitting where to enable us to look like we knew everyones names

What are we working on?

mst talked to us about the existing and proposed architecture making extensive use of the conference room white boards as we went along.

The legacy used Plagger to collect blog feeds and aggregate them into a statically generated planet. New feeds are signed up via a basic web form. The feeds data was stored in a SQLite database file via DBIx::Class, while the post data was stored in CSV files by Plagger.

The new would replace Plagger with Perlanet, and the statically generated content with a dynamic Catalyst web UI. The CSV files would move into the SQLite database and be stored in a table to enable the dynamic generation and archive ability.

Who was doing what?

mst took the overall role of technical architect and had a good idea of where he wanted to go with the project flitting from one place to another as needed.

acid2 picked up Perlanet & Perlanet::IronMan and proceeded to hack it into shape for our particular needs.

fade and iain continued working on the IronMan::Web aspect which they’d already started working on prior to the hack day. Some might say this is cheating, I say that it’s a good way to know what you’re doing in advance.

grim & castaway took the original DBIx::Class IronMan::Schema and modified it to support holding the blog posts. Alongside this, they began working on tools to import the legacy Plagger CSV data into the new schema.

Leigh sat amongst us and worked on her NaNoRiMo, and why not.

Refreshments and the essential caffine, pizza and beer.

Tea and coffee from Lancasters premier coffee shop Atkinsons fuelled a coding haze that saw us write some Good Shit(tm). Sadly, being coding geeks means that your supply of coffee needs to be plentiful and strong. mdk had to make a trip to fetch more coffee when we drained the office supplies dry!

Towards the end of the day, Shadowcat shelled out to further fuel the session with pizza, beer, nibbles and awesomeness.

What did we learn from the IronMan hack day?

Whilst much has been written about software development both in the commercial world and in the open source community, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on my own view of the only open source project that I’ve been involved with.

So why bother to stop and reflect? It mostly went well!

The Prince 2 project management framework refers to a “Lessons Learned” log, it’s something you keep as a project progresses so you have something to review at the end. Problems encountered to avoid in future, that kind of thing.

We all examine our own code, if we’re lucky any documentation and such things, but do we take enough time to examine the organisational aspects of the process that brought us to this point?

These are my notes and ramblings on how we might have done things better.

Supporting infrastructure – laying the foundations.

Whilst it’s certainly possible to do these tasks on the day, it’s dead time for almost all of your developers. Do what you can to prepare as much as possible in advance and keep everyone in the zone for as long as possible.

Publicity and marketing.

There’s lots of information online on how to market events. Yes. I said the M word.

It’s important. If people don’t know about your event, they definitely won’t come even if it’s something they’d want to help out with.

Start pimping your event early and often. We had a good physical and electronic turnout. Even though we were all in the same room, we tended to use IRC for communication anyway, which allowed extensive contributions from outside the room.

Who?

Scope is all important as we all know. I’ve said already you can probably do all the suggestions here on the day and that’s certainly simple if you have four people.

What if you have two hundred? Hack days are a wonderful thing, but organising for two hundred and then having four turn up would be as bad as organising for four and having two hundred turn up. This could be really bad for you and for your project.

Knowing who you’ve got showing up allows you to think ahead and discuss aspects of your project that you want to split up into manageable chunks. With a little planning, the required information can be given to the right people who can then talk to others on the day. Think scalability and resilience, try to eliminate your single points of failure The more others know about the plan, the less the chance of a Guru Meditation Error.

Remember that physical presence is not required and extend your invitation to those who may not be able to physically attend but still wish to contribute.

Network and connectivity.

Now you know how many you’re expecting, you can think about the capacity of any network that you need to provide for the event. Can you get away with a sinlgle domestic wireless access point for your four people, or do you need something more substantial for your two hundred?

Despite his best efforts, epitaphs fight with the wireless and LAN through the course of the day resulted an a few outages stopping us all working.

Version control.

I don’t care to argue which one you use, but you should use a VCS of some kind. We chose to use subversion. Regardless, the following points are still valid.

Create your repository or use an existing one.
Set appropriate permissions on the newly created or existing repo.
Find out who’s coming so you can create user accounts in advance.
Make sure its something your target group may be familiar with!

We lost time to repository creation and user setup that we could have reasonably been done beforehand.

Venue.

Our venue not only provided very nice refreshments, but a large number of white boards. Never underestimate the power of explaining things with a whiteboard! It not only tells everyone else what you’re thinking, but helps to solidify your own thoughts.

Don’t underestimate how many 13A sockets you’re going to need for laptops.

What are we working on?

Turnout was good, we had a number of physical attendees along with people joining us via IRC. Everyone was fired up and ready to go. There was one major problem. We didn’t all understand why we were there, what we were working on or what the objectives for the day were.

Several hours were spent hashing out design, which might well have been needed, but some of the other fundamentals were missing.

1. What are we working on?

IronMan is a blog agregation service to promote Perl. A shop window for the world.
2. Why are we working on it?

We want to streamline the management of the existing service by replacing plagger with a new model based around Perlanet for feed collection.

We’re going to replace the existing static page creation with a Catalyst based web application that will display the content dynamically and permit people to view the blog post archives for specific days or months.
3. What are we hoping to achieve in the timeframe?

In the day, we’re going to:
* Get a good fundamental understanding of the existing architecture so that everyone knows how things work.
* Review and implement changes to the database model.
* Begin working on the Perlanet collection code.
* Begin working on the Catalyst web UI code.

It’s easy to list these things in retrospect, but we could have saved a large amount of time and effort if we’d have thought about these things before we all got together.

Test deployment.

During the course of the day, we didn’t have a defined checkpoint to deploy what we had so that everyone else could see it.

Take the time in advance to configure a staging system so that at pre-defined points during the day, everyone commits their changes and the staging system updated and restarted as required.

Try not to break the build…

Beyond the hack day.

Upon these sage words of wisdom, your hackday went well, right? Remember to look back at what you’ve learned at each step of the process, what worked and what didn’t.

Once your hackday has been and gone, you’re left with the inevitable job of continuing to support the project you’ve been working on. This is a whole new set of challenges in much the same way as the organisation of the hack day itself.

Documentation.

Nobody likes writing it, everybody likes reading it. Well, most people.

To quote castaway: “documentation is hard”. She’s right of course.

If you’re lucky you’ll have a documentation whiz like castaway on your team, but if you don’t you either need to find one or try your hardest to make do with the people you have. In order to get people interested, you need to have a basic level of documentation in place or it will put people off from contributing to your project.

Document your version control system structure. Doesn’t matter how you lay things out as long as it’s clear what’s going on.

Once you have your repository structure documented, then document how you move through the different stages of release. I’m a simple bloke and generally like to roughly document the commands I use to ‘svn copy’ things from one area of the repository to another. It’s a simple thing, but it’s something that will save you time and keep you consistent in your naming.

If you don’t do the above, your repository may end up looking like a dogs breakfast and people will be put off contributing patches simply because they don’t have time to try and work out what’s going on. Post deployment of the IronMan project, it took around a mans day worth of work to get things into a sensible state, in the mean time several people were unable to contribute because they couldn’t work out which files they should be working on.

I’ve mentioned staging your development for the period of the hack day, you should do this all the time. Not only does it allow you to check that things will work on a machine that isn’t yours, it checks other peoples committed chanmges and gives the project visibility. If you don’t have visibility before you deploy to your live service, then you can’t get feedback from your user community.

Organising your next hack day.

So following your last successful hack day, you’re mad for organising another, right!?

I’m making one major change for this year. The North West England Perl Mongers haven’t decided what hack day 2010 will be yet, we’re asking the membership to present lightening talks for their project at the September technical meeting. This does a few very important things:

You can’t present on your project and sell it if you haven’t thought about it and what you want to achieve
If you want your project worked on this year, you need to sell it to the membership who will be voting at the end of the evening.

It might solve some of the preparation issues, it might not. Perhaps this time next year I’ll finally finish some more reflections…

Armed with your reflections and thoughts, bring free software to the masses, because we can and because it’s the socially responsible thing to do. Plus all th ecool kids are doing it….

I read with interest Jochen Hayek’s blog post (http://blog-en.jochen.hayek.name/2010/06/old-python-anti-perl-propaganda.html) on Propaganda Posters used against Perl and then Python. I then followed the links to the original argument (which I recommend you follow) which is on Paul Battley’s Blog (original anti-Perl piece here).

The posters in both of these cases were produced some time ago. The original anti-perl piece is rather crude (not in taste just in skills used to create) as it is simply an original poster with text pasted onto it. I have done similar pieces myself they are fun but require little effort.

Paul’s piece is far superior and worthy of some regard as he took an original poster and then recreated it with a new message. It is still a rather bombastic approach but I like the fact that he took the time and effort to create a homage piece as opposed to just cut and paste blitzing or image manipulation (“photoshopping” if one believes the current zeitgeist) that so many quickly fall to.

Jochen asked if anyone would do the same for Perl and I thought it would be funky. I do like playing with posters or image stills and doing the crude text-replacing and image manipulation thing and have produced a series of amusing images (links at some other date). But, for this I thought I would give it a little more effort and go for Paul’s approach of re-creating an original with a new message.

So I selected my image (I went for Russian Propaganda posters as I have always been fond of the strong artwork):

I then set to redrawing the image in Inkscape so that I would have a piece of Vector Art that would be easily scaleable for different purposes and would enable some nice strong and uniform colours and the ability to move objects about or insert new images to change the message etc. (I wasn’t about to paint something). On the way I made the choice to change the gender of one of the subjects as it suited my message more. When I went for the tagline I wanted to say something without being too offensive and not at all derogatory, so I chose a simple message.

If anyone has any ideas for a different text then let me know as that is easy to create. If you click on the image (twice – once to the image page and then on the image again once there) you can see it at a larger size. I am pleased with my efforts which is why I blogged about it but let me know what you think. The image can be used but please ask permission (I like to keep note of who is using my work and where it is used)

-ttfn – Mark

If you have had any interaction with the folks at the TPF I think you will already know that they are quite super people. So why am I saying that the TPF are great in this blog.

Well….

It is all down to the efforts I have personally seen them make over the past twelve months and even more recently their input into the send-a-newbie scheme.

As you may know, and if you don’t you can visit the send-a-newbie website or read the last blog post, the send-a-newbie scheme is all about raising money to send people new to Perl events to a YAPC. This year it is being run by the EPO for YAPC::EU. In January I was approached by Karen Pauley of the TPF to ask if they minded if the TPF ran a scheme for YAPC::NA along the same lines. I of course said that I didn’t mind, in fact I actively encouraged this, the more successful schemes the better in my opinion and the TPF are actively involved with the American conferences on an administrative basis so they are best placed to run this initiative in the US.

Karen and I both agreed that this was another area that the TPF and EPO can mutually make as much an impact as possible, and recently they went a stage further with this by donating to the send-a-newbie scheme we are running. So I would like to give a big thanks to the Board and to Karen for supporting us in this manner.

(Due to time constraints the TPF will not be running the initiative for this year’s YAPC::NA (though there are plenty of things they are doing at the event to include first time attendees in the proceedings), from my understanding they will be running this next year.)

The TPF do so much more than this though. From actively supporting communities through grants and funding, to funding and encouraging the organisation of YAPCs and other workshops, providing websites and resources as well as promoting and supporting the marketing and promotion of Perl and the Perl community.

They are also incredibly approachable. If you meet any of these people you quickly discover that they are supportive in person. I have found every TPF board member and officer I have met to be helpful, attentive, to give encouragement and to have a real care (in fact a passion) for getting Perl the recognition it deserves and to expanding its horizons.

So I want to thank them once more and to raise a jolly huzzah for their continued development and existence.

——————————

I thought I would re-use this blog post to repeat these two calls and to direct anyone who doesn’t know about the send-a-newbie initiative to the appropriate locations.

If you know of any mailing lists, forums etc., that can be used to post these messages to then please do not hesitate to do so.

The mailouts are printed below, just copy and paste as appropriate and spread the word. Please also consider donating to this effort.

————-DONATIONS————–

Subject line: Donate to Send-a-Newbie
Last year many individuals and companies donated money to the send-a-newbie initiative run by Edmund von der Burg. It was a great success. At the end of last year Edmund approached the EPO with the task of organising a similar event this year as he was unable to because of other commitments.

Therefore I come to you all to ask you to donate once again to this excellent project, please make a donation at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (or send your donation to send-a-newbie@paypal.com). If you made a donation last year, I thank you and would gratefully ask for you to do so once more.[1]

If you are new to this idea allow me a few moments to describe it.

The send-a-newbie scheme will allow people to attend a Perl conference (YAPC::EU for us, and this year YAPC::NA will have a scheme organised by the Perl Foundation) if:

a. they have never attended a YAPC/Major Perl event previously;
b. they are financially unable to do so;
c. they work in/study/use Perl.

The only changes we have made to the terms of entry this year is to broaden the scope. The Enlightened Perl Organisation members voted that we manage this initiative on the sole condition that it was open to all people regardless of age or circumstance (there were some minor restrictions in the previous year that did not reflect our requirements).

This year we will be listing our sponsors on the website to express our thanks[2] and because we believe in openess of information. A list of names will appear that people can admire and give respect[3]. If you would like to/do donate and don’t want your name listed then please contact Mark or Rosellyne and let them know and they will ensure that you are not listed.

Thanks for your consideration, and thanks-in-advance to those who are considering donating.

Kind regards

Mark
Secretary to the EPO

p.s. If you know of any list, forum where this information might be posted then I would kindly ask that you repeat it there.

[1] Please, please, pretty please on bended knees

[2] An almost exact opposite of name and shame.

[3] Also they can perhaps feel sickened that they were too jaded to support such a great idea.

—————END——————–

————-APPLICATIONS————–

Subject line: Send-a-newbie – Applications

The application process for the Send-a-Newbie initiative to allow participation at YAPC::EU::2010, which allows applicants who would otherwise be unable to due to financial constraints, is now open.

Please go to: http://www.send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org/applications.html for more information on how to apply.

Please note that the only condition, and that will only be applied dependent on the number of applications (it is a merit system based on exposure) is that you have not attended a YAPC or major Perl Workshop previously. No constraint on age, experience etc., is made.

If you know of any mailing list that this notice may be displayed then please forward the contents/repeat the information there.

If you wish to donate to this initiative then please visit: send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (or send your donation to send-a-newbie@paypal.com).

Kind regards

Mark Keating
Secretary to the EPO

—————END——————–

-ttfn – Mark

We’ve seen a report of posts missing from the aggregator which I’ve finally had chance to look into this evening. Thanks specifically to Curtis Jewell for bringing this to our attention via mst.

The problem stems from the assumption (you know this is going to be good…) that the authors field retrieved from a post should not be null. Indeed, this seems sensible, but there seem to be a number of feeds that don’t observe this for some reason (which I frankly don’t care about, especially now I have a different way to assume it).

If the author field on a post is undefined, it is now taken from the title given to your feed when you signed up for IronMan. This seems to be the sensible fall back in the absence of the data on the feed.

As always, comments appreciated.

Ian & the IronMan dev team.

So it has been a month since I last posted (I took a long break to rest from blogging, just was feeling a bit blogged out, but now I am back ).

You may have already gathered, if you are a member of the EPO or are on any of the mailing lists that this has been posted to, that the Enlightened Perl Organisation has taken over the running of the send-a-newbie program that was first initiated by Edmund von der Burg for YAPC::EU::2009.
The call for donations to this excellent scheme has already been sent out and we have now sent out the call for applicants.
I thought I would use this blog post to repeat these two calls and to direct anyone who doesn’t know about this effort to te appropriate locations.

If you know of any mailing lists, forums etc., that can be used to post these messages to then please do not hesitate to do so.

The mailouts are printed below, just copy and paste as appropriate and spread the word. Please also consider donating to this effort.

————-DONATIONS————–

Subject line: Donate to Send-a-Newbie
Last year many individuals and companies donated money to the send-a-newbie initiative run by Edmund von der Burg. It was a great success. At the end of last year Edmund approached the EPO with the task of organising a similar event this year as he was unable to because of other commitments.

Therefore I come to you all to ask you to donate once again to this excellent project, please make a donation at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (or send your donation to send-a-newbie@paypal.com). If you made a donation last year, I thank you and would gratefully ask for you to do so once more.[1]

If you are new to this idea allow me a few moments to describe it.

The send-a-newbie scheme will allow people to attend a Perl conference (YAPC::EU for us, and this year YAPC::NA will have a scheme organised by the Perl Foundation) if:

a. they have never attended a YAPC/Major Perl event previously;
b. they are financially unable to do so;
c. they work in/study/use Perl.

The only changes we have made to the terms of entry this year is to broaden the scope. The Enlightened Perl Organisation members voted that we manage this initiative on the sole condition that it was open to all people regardless of age or circumstance (there were some minor restrictions in the previous year that did not reflect our requirements).

This year we will be listing our sponsors on the website to express our thanks[2] and because we believe in openess of information. A list of names will appear that people can admire and give respect[3]. If you would like to/do donate and don’t want your name listed then please contact Mark or Rosellyne and let them know and they will ensure that you are not listed.

Thanks for your consideration, and thanks-in-advance to those who are considering donating.

Kind regards

Mark
Secretary to the EPO

p.s. If you know of any list, forum where this information might be posted then I would kindly ask that you repeat it there.

[1] Please, please, pretty please on bended knees

[2] An almost exact opposite of name and shame.

[3] Also they can perhaps feel sickened that they were too jaded to support such a great idea.

—————END——————–

————-APPLICATIONS————–

Subject line: Send-a-newbie – Applications

The application process for the Send-a-Newbie initiative to allow participation at YAPC::EU::2010, which allows applicants who would otherwise be unable to due to financial constraints, is now open.

Please go to: http://www.send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org/applications.html for more information on how to apply.

Please note that the only condition is that you have not attended a YAPC or major Perl Workshop previously. No constraint on age, experience etc., is made.

If you know of any mailing list that this notice may be displayed then please forward the contents/repeat the information there.

If you wish to donate to this initiative then please visit: send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (or send your donation to send-a-newbie@paypal.com).

Kind regards

Mark Keating
Secretary to the EPO

—————END——————–

-ttfn – Mark

So I’m looking for a CRM for a charity I work with, preferably something written in Perl that’s Free Software. I have specific things I need and want such as event organisation and mailing list management of both the paper and electronic form.

I’m once again struck by the number one failing of open source and free software products, I can’t work out what it does! What features does it offer? How will it make my life easier/faster/longer/stronger (delete as appropriate)?

Your project might be the best ‘X’ since the concept was invented, but if you don’t tell me why I should spend my time to download it and install it then I’m going to move on and look at the next one. I don’t want to spend a couple of hours getting something working when it doesn’t offer some basic feature that I absolutely cannot live without, that’s dead time to me.

Please take a moment to look at your project. Compare it to it’s commercial offering (if appropriate). How does it compare by face value? Do you have headline top five and complete feature listings that someone can look over quickly to see if it fits their needs? Does your site focus on the technical detail of the project and provide no higher level information? Do you actually say what your project, Perl module or doodad does in a simple one line summary that your mother could understand?

Seriously. If someone can’t tell these things in five minutes of looking at your site/module, you’ve probably lost them forever. That’s their loss too remember as your doodad is the best ‘X’ ever available!