I was at YAPC::NA in late June. I should have written a summary about it a long time ago, but I wanted to include a link to the video of my Stackato Lightning Talk. That has not been put up on the web yet, but it should eventually appear at http://www.presentingperl.org/.

There were many interesting things at YAPC::NA, but here are the things I still remember one month later. I guess that makes them some kind of personal highlights.

App::GitGot

“got” is a neat little commandline tool that helps you manage all the git repos you have in various places on your machine.

You can easily check if any of your repos contain local changes that have not been pushed back to the upstream/origin repo.

Carton

Carton is a Perl module dependency manager. Using any of the current CPAN shells will install whatever is the latest version of the required modules at this point in time.

Carton makes it possible to record the versions that you are using in your app and then reinstall this specific set at the same version number on a different machine.

This makes deployment much more predictable. I’m sure we are going to use it in Stackato once it becomes a bit more mature. Right now it is still ALPHA software under heavy development.

Pod::Cpandoc

“cpandoc” is a clone of the “perldoc” command line tool. The only difference is that it will also display documentation for modules that are not yet installed by fetching it from CPAN.

I am wondering if we shouldn’t use it in ActivePerl as a replacement for “perldoc” because for all installed modules it will continue to work exactly the same (so you always get the documentation for the installed version of a module, and not for the latest from CPAN, to avoid confusion).

Plack::Middleware::InteractiveDebugger

This debugger will catch any unhandled exception in your PSGI web application and create a Javascript based interactive debugger on the fly. The page will show a stack trace with an command prompt at each stack level. That means you can inspect variables and run arbitrary Perl code at each level directly from your browser.

The debugger doesn’t work with forking web servers, and should obviously never be enabled in a production application.

The Perl Foundation’s “Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund” (P5CMF)

For the last year Dave Mitchel has been working on long-standing, hard to diagnose and/or fix bugs, funded by a large donation from Booking.com. This has been such a success that TPF has now established a separate Perl 5 Maintenance Fund, and is actively soliciting donations for it. The goal is to also sponsor Nicholas Clark, another former Perl 5 pumpking, in addition to Dave Mitchel, to accelerate processing of the maintenance backlog.

During YAPC::NA 2011 Booking.com, cPanel, and by the Vienna Perl Mongers each pledged $10.000.

Everyone is hiring Perl developers

If there was an overall theme to YAPC::NA 2011, then I would say it was “We are hiring”. Several sponsors had multi-person recruiting teams on site, and virtually every other speaker concluded their talk with: “BTW, if you found this interesting, my company is hiring Perl developers”. In addition many of the 30 second spots between Lightning talks were also use by people advertising that they are looking for Perl developers.