LA perl mongers October update and September recap

September's perl mongers meeting was awesome. We had two presentations (both from me!). The meeting for October will be Wednesday October 28th. The first presentation was an example of getting work done using perl. Specifically using JIRA::Client (a thin wrapper around SOAP::Lite) to access a JIRA bug tracking installation to pull bug counts. Slides included fully working example code. The author of JIRA::Client commented on the blog post. That is so exciting! That's what community and social coding feels like.

Nice example. It inspired me to make it easier to get from filter names to filter ids. I just released JIRA::Client version 0.16 which implicitly casts filter names into filter ids in the calls to getIssueCountForFilter and getIssuesFromFilterWithLimit.
-- Gnustavo

The second presentation was a discussion of "care and feeding of third party perl modules." We started with my blog post and went around discussing what approaches people had tried, which ones they liked which ones they found lacking. Tommy was kind enough to run the video camera for part of the discussion, so once I transfer the tape, we'll have something to upload.

Some of the main points to come out of the discussion were: the importance of staying up-to-date, of having unit-tests of the features you expect and use from external modules, green field testing (make sure you can build it all from scratch in your test environ). The need for a company to institute some sort of revisioning on top of CPAN came up a few times.

Some novel ideas included: source control hooks that check for external modules used in a given commit and updating all those modules to current release, requiring the programmer to verify that his/her checking works with current modules; a single repository for third party modules and other code, that can be easily pulled into any internal project or repository (local::lib helps here); considering what is pushing you to be "up-to-date" as maybe you don't actually need it (sacrilege!)

Some related tasks that need to happen soon: upload the video and notes from the second presentation before the October meeting. Update the website with the October date Edit:done. Put up the slides for the JIRA::Client talk. Find a speaker for October ( Tommy signed up, but then had to defer to November). Find a November date to work around Thanksgiving. Decide if we need to cut back to a single speaker (or two speakers every two months).