9: Neil Bowers - PAUSE and CPAN admin
Neil Bowers is a long time Perl programmer, and has managed all sorts of developers, including Perl ones.
He is also a prolific Perl blogger who writes articles comparing 10-20 Perl modules that are supposed to do the same task. Offering a step in the direction of CPAN curation.
He is also the joint owner of a small bootstrapped Perl-based start-up company.
(41:29 min)
(In the the first 10-15 seconds the sound had some problems. Sorry for that.)
Download:
mp3 (38 Mb) 41:29 mins
- The blog of Neil Bowers "running" on his own, not-yet-published static blog engine. (NEILB on CPAN.)
- Neil Bowers on blogs.perl.org
- The business Neil runs is called Cogendo - It provides a web based service (in the cloud) for companies managing setting objectives, and doing an appraisal at the end of the year for their employees.
- Neil mentions the reviews of CPAN modules that he writes,
and specifically mentioned:
- A review of modules for generating passwords.
- A review of modules for parsing User-Agent strings.
- Working with Olaf Alders (OALDERS) to produce a single module for parsing user agent strings.
- Neil mentioned Andy Wardly, ABW on CPAN, and the Template Toolkit
- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) who is (considering) writing his own static blogging software.
- Zefram (Andrew Main) and Zefram on CPAN
- Questhub and its creator Vyacheslav Matyukhin BEREKUK
- Yanick Champoux's proposal and Tim Bunce's proposal (TIMB) discussing tagging/recommendations on MetaCPAN
Some of the things Neil talked about:
- Put links to competing / similar / complementary modules in the SEE ALSO section of your module.
- Help other people to solve their problems to get a reputation for being helpful, being a good programmer. Helping other people is the best way to make sure you understand the technology. Try Perl on Stack Overflow. Questhub is a good way to encourage people and to offer help and advice, without waiting for someone to ask a specific question.
- Having a clear goal and thinking how to get from here to there. Breaking things down in smaller sized chunks, keep them on a list, or in Questhub.
