Memoirs of a Roadie

Reanimator

Posted on 30th January 2020

So it's been a while since I posted, and there are several reasons for that. Mostly the fact I have been busy with real life, including family and work, and haven't had the time, inclination and/or ideas to put thoughts down in this blog. However, I'm going to try and change that this year, and start a series of blog posts with themes, that I can pick up in parts over the course of the year. The aim being to post at least once a month.

This month you'll get this post, which is mostly an apology, but I have another that I have planned as the beginning of a regular once a month post. 

As you can probably tell if you've read my blog posts, my main interests are music, gaming, Perl and exploring. I've done precious little of that last one over the past few years, but hopefully that will change. Perl is still my focus at work, but my OpenSource projects have largely taken a notable backseat. That is something that will be definitely changing this year, with maybe even the occasional blog post, as I want to update a lot of the code that has been sitting around on my old laptop, waiting to be released. 

I'll take an aside here, briefly, as back in 2015 I bought a new Linux laptop, but sadly I dropped it, and damaged the screen. At the same time, work gave me a brand new laptop, so the impetus to get the personal laptop sorted fell by the way side. And by the time I thought to get it fixed, it had just passed it's warranty. I couldn't use the work laptop for my OpenSource projects, so they got put off, with minor fixes here and there, by using my webserver as a dev box. It kind of works, but not ideal for how I was used to editing, commiting and deploying to test environments. So they have languished a bit. Ok a lot! 

However, Gaming and Music have both had somewhat of a resurgence in my interest these last few years. 

Music never really went away, but my gig attendance had dropped off during the earlier part of the decade. That kind of changed when a lot of the bands I hadn't seen in a long time, or had never seen, all happened to start touring. This year I have several already booked throughout the year, so expect the odd review now and then too.

My gaming exposure, aside from board games and mobile gaming, has seen a lot more of me watching and enjoying the current retro gaming community. Many of the games I've never heard of, and those I have, I haven't played since the 80s, so it's been wonderful to see that era of gaming, a time that saw me get more into programming, come to life again. I'll never be a streamer, but I'll quite happily watch the fun of someone else playing those games now. The retro gaming community that I've discovered, also happens to have some of the loveliest people around. It's the kind of gaming community I wish I had been a part of back in the 80s ... even though there wasn't really one like there is now.

With the lack of writing over the last few years, I've been out of practice with blog writing, so you'll have to forgive my rambling for a while. I might get there one day!

Any road up, expect some music posts, Perl posts and maybe other rambling, notes and rantings. 

Let's Go Crazy

Posted on 31st May 2016

Last weekend saw me in Rubgy for the 9th QA Hackathon. This is a Perl event where the key developers for CPAN, PAUSE, MetaCPAN, CPAN Testers, Dist::Zilla, Test2 and many other Perl 5 and Perl 6 projects, get together to discuss problems, future plans and collaborate on code.

Although I was a co-organiser of the event, I really would like to thank my fellow co-organisers; Neil Bowers (NEILB) and JJ Allen (JONALLEN). Without these guys, organising this QA Hackathon would have been tough, as they really did all the hard work. Also many thanks to Wendy for keeping us fed with nibbles, keeping notes and generally making sure we all stayed focused. An event like this needs a team, and they are an awesome team.

My main aim for this event was to meet Doug Bell (PREACTION). Back last summer, the CPAN Testers server had some severe problems, which meant we had to switch to a new physical server. It was at this moment I realised that I couldn"t do this alone any more. Doug stepped up and started to take over the reins, and has done a great job since. However, I"d never met Doug, so this was going to the first opportunity to catch up in person. After only a few moments of saying hello, I knew we had found the right person to take over CPAN Testers. Doug has a lot of great ideas, and is more than capable of taking the project to the next level, which is where I wanted to see it grow to, but knew it needed fresh eyes to take it there. I feel immensely confident that I have left the keys in capable hands, and with the ideas Doug has already shown me, I expect bigger and better things for CPAN Testers' future. Please look after him :)

On the first day Oriol Soriano Vila (UREE) introduced himself to Doug and I. Oriol was suggested to the organisers by his employer, and after explaining what the event was about, Oriol was even more enthusiastic to attend. I'm glad he did, as he is another great asset to both CPAN Testers and Perl. Although we have referred to him as our "intern", Oriol has proved he was just one of the team. He has some great ideas, asked all the right questions and had results by the end of the hackathon too! You can read more on his own blog.

So once we got our introductions out of the way, we started looking at a high priority problem. One that had been reported in two different ways, but was in fact the same problem. The Summary RAG bars and the release database (as used by MetaCPAN). In turns out the problem was straightforward. After the server crash last year, The database scheme used to rebuild the new server was missing a new column in the release summary table, and thus wasn't getting updated. Once that was fixed, it was "simply" a matter of rebuilding the table. Sadly it took the whole weekend to rebuild, but once completed, we were able to start regenerating the release SQLite database. That took a week, but I"m pleased to say all is now updating and available again.

While that was rebuilding, I started to take a look at some other issues. After introducing Oriol to our family of websites, he registered for the wiki, and spotted a problem with the registration process. After some tinkering, I got that working again. I've no idea how long it's been a problem, but apologies to anyone affected.

In the introductions at the beginning of the event, Leo Lapworth (LLAP) mentioned that he was hoping to refine MetaCPAN"s use of Fastly, and was interested in helping anyone else who might be interested in using the service for their project. I got Leo to sit with me for a while and he gave me a good run through of what the service is, what it can do, and why we should use it for CPAN Testers. I didn"t take much convincing, and quickly opened an account and started to move the main family of websites to it. We have since seen a slight drop on hits to the server, but I expect that to improve as the static pages (the individual reports) are cached. Even the dynamic pages can benefit from their caching, as although many will change throughout the day, only a small portion are updated more than once an hour. Once we learn more about Fastly, expect to see some better response times for your page hits.

Talking with Christian Walde (MITHALDU), he wanted to help with the performance of the websites, particularly the Reports website. However, with the rebuilding ongoing, the server wasn't in the best place to really evaluate performance. He did happen to mention that the reports he was getting from the mailer were coming through as garbage. After some investigation, I discovered that the mailer had not been upgraded to use Sereal, which is now our serialiser of choice for the reports stored in the database. With that fixed, together with some further improvements and with all tests running, we put it live and waited. The following morning Christian report he had readable reports coming through again.

One aspect for testing the Reports site, and one that would have restricted Christian to evaluate the performance, is that apart from mine and Doug"s development machines, there is no stable installable full instance of the CPAN Testers Report site, including databases and cron scripts. As such, Doug has been working on providing exactly that. It has been on my TODO list for some time, as some of the bug reports and issue requests would have been quashed much more efficiently had others been able to fire up a working site and be able to send a pull request. You can read more about Doug"s progress on his blog, and hopefully this will encourage more people in the longer term to get involved with CPAN Testers development work.

Throughout the weekend I worked on cleaning up some of the templates on the various websites, ensuring that sponsors were correctly attributed, and fixed several bugs in some of the associated distributions. Not all have been pushed to CPAN, but work is ongoing.

Having finally met, Doug and I went through all the website logins and social media accounts, and made sure he had all the keys. The handover process has been a longish one, but I didn"t want to overwhelm Doug, and wanted him to find his feet first. After this weekend, expect more posts and updates from him rather than me. Please look after him :)

I also joined in some for the discussions regarding the CPAN River and the naming of the QA Hackathon. Neil has written up both admirably, and while I didn"t contribute much, it was good to see a lot of healthy discussion on both subjects. Regarding the naming of the event, I do think it's a shame that the likes of Google have turn the word "Hackathon" into the concept of a competition event, which the QA Hackathon event is definitely not. Ours is about collaboration and planning for the future, with many of the key technical leads for the various toolchain and associated projects within Perl 5 and Perl 6. I don"t have a suitable name to suggest, but I would recommend ensuring the acronym could not be used negatively.

In the coming weeks, I hope to collate all the website tests I run prior to updating the CPAN Testers family websites, and handing over to Doug for his new development environment for CPAN Testers. This will hopefully enable easier access to anyone wanting to help fix problems on the websites and backends in the future. 

In short, my completed tasks during the hackathon were:

• Fixed the registrations for the CPAN Testers Wiki.
• Got CPAN Testers Reports running on the Fastly (http://fastly.com) service, allowing us to caching some of the pages, and reduce the load on the webserver when trying to recreate reasonably static pages. Also means the routing for anyone viewing the site outside of Europe is going to reduce page load times too.
• Fixed some bugs in the Reports Mailer, refreshed the tests and test data, and tidied up the notifications.
• Fixed the Reports Mailer for sending individual reports, due to the DB storage now using Sereal. Note this had no effect on the summary reports.
• Fixed a long running bug with the Summary panel (and release summary table), which turns out has also been affecting MetaCPAN.
• Continued to hand over the final keys to Doug Bell (PREACTION), who is now carrying the torch for CPAN Testers.
• Fixed a few bugs in other distributions, a couple related to CPAN Testers.
• Cleaned up some of the CPAN Testers family website templates.
• Joined discussions for The Perl River, the (re)naming of the QAH and the future of CPAN Testers.

It was a very productive event, and for CPAN Testers, I'm pleased it gave Doug and I a chance to knowledge share, and ensure he has everything he needs to not only keep the project going, but help develop new ideas to solve some of the big data problems that CPAN Testers sometimes throws up. Over the past 6 months or so, I have been taking a back seat, for various reasons, and in the coming months you will hear much less from me regarding CPAN Testers. Occasionally, I may pitch in to discussions to help give some background to decisions that were made, to give some context to why we wrote code a certain way, or designed a DB table the way we did, but this is now Doug's project, he will be the main point of contact now.

During the wrap at the end of the event, where we got to say a little piece about what we achieved, Chris Williams (BINGOS) made announcement to say thank you to me for 10 years of CPAN Testers. After taking on the challenge to grow CPAN Testers, and make it more interesting for people to get involved, I think I've achieved that. The project is well respected throughout the Perl community, and I've had some kind words from people in the wider OpenSource community too, and with over 68 million test reports in the database, I think I can safely say that has been a success. I wish Doug all the best taking it to the next level, and hope he gains as much knowledge and experience (if not more) from the project as I've done. Thanks to everyone who has support the project, me and all those that came before.

The QA Hackathon would not have been possible without the Sponsors. No matter what they have contributed, we owe them all our thanks for enabling the participants the time and ability to work together for the benefit of all. Thank you to FastMail, ActiveState, ZipRecruiter, Strato, SureVoIP, CV-Library, OpusVL, thinkproject!, MongoDB, Infinity, Dreamhost, Campus Explorer, Perl 6, Perl Careers, Evozon, Booking, Eligo, Oetiker+Partner, CAPSiDE, Perl Services, Procura, Constructor.io, Robbie Bow, Ron Savage, Charlie Gonzalez, and Justin Cook.

Crash Course in Brain Surgery

Posted on 22nd March 2015

A Year of CPAN Uploads

On Thursday, 19th March 2015 I uploaded my 366th consecutive release to CPAN. To most that may well be "meh, whatever!", but for me it has been an exhausting yet fulfilling exercise. The last 60 days though, were undoubtably the hardest to achieve.

When I started this escapade, I did it without realising it. It was several days before I noticed that I had been commiting changes every day, just after the QA Hackahon in Lyon. What made it worse was that I then discovered that I had missed a day, and could have had a 3 day head-start beyond the 9 days I already had in hand. Just one day behind me was Neil Bowers, and the pair of us set about trying to reach 100 consecuive days. It took a while for us to get into the flow, but once we did, we were happily committing each day.

Both of us created our own automated upload scripts, to help us maintain the daily uploads. This was partly to ensure we didn't forget, but also allowed us to be away for a day or two and still know that we would be able to upload something. In my case I had worried I would miss out when I went on holiday to Cornwall, but thankfully the apartment had wifi installed, and I was able to manage my releases and commits every morning before we left to explore for the day.

I mostly worked at weekends and stocked up on releases, sometimes with around 10 days prepared in advance. Most of the changes centred around bug fixes, documentaion updates and test suite updates, but after a short while, we both started looking at our CPANTS ratings and other metrics around what makes a good packaged release. We both created quests on QuestHub, and ticked off the achievements as we went. There were plenty of new features along the way too, as well as some new modules and distributions, as we both wanted to avoid making only minor tweaks, just for the sake of releasing something. I even adopted around 10 distributions from others, who had either moved on to other things or sadly passed away, and brought them all up to date.

Sadly, Neil wasn't able to sustain the momentum, and had to bail out after 111 consecutive uploads. Thankfully, I still had plenty of fixes and updates to work through, so I was hopeful I could keep going for a little while longer at least.

One major change that happened during 2014, was to the CPANTS analysis code. Kenichi Ishigaki updated the META file evaluations to employ a stricter rendition of the META Specification, which meant the license field in most of my distributions on CPAN now failed. As a consequence this gave me around 80 distributions that needed a release. On top of this, I committed myself to releasing 12 new distribuions, one each month, for a year, beginning March 2014. Although I've now completed the release of the 12 distributions, I have yet to complete all the blog posts, so that quest is still incomplete.

I made a lot of changes to Labyrinth (my website management framework) and the various ISBN scrapers I had written, so these formed the bedrock of my releases. Without these I probably wouldn't have been able to make 100 consecutive releases, and definitely not for a full year. But here I am 366+ days later and still have releases yet to do. Most of the releases from me in the future will centre around Labyrinth and CPAN Testers, but as both require quite in depth work, it's unlikely you'll see such a frequent release schedule. I expect I'll be able to get at least one released a week, to maintain and extend my current 157 week stretch, but sustaining a daily release is going to be a struggle.

Having set the bar, Mohammad S Anwar (MANWAR) and Michal Špaček (SKIM) have now entered the race, and Mohammad has said he wants to beat my record. Both are just over 200 days behind, and judging from my experience, they are going to find it tricky once they hit around 250, unless they have plenty of plans for releases by then. After 100, I had high hopes of reaching 200, however I wasn't so sure I would make 300. After 300, it really was much tougher to think of what to release. Occasionally, I would be working on a test suite and bug fixes would suggest themselves, but mostly it was about working through the CPAN Testers reports. Although, I do have to thank the various book sites too, for updating their sites, which in turn meant I had several updates I could make to the scrapers.

I note that Mohammad and Michal both are sharing releases against the Map-Tube variants, which may keep them going for a while, but eventually they do need to think about other distributions. Both have plenty of other distributions in their repetoire, so it's entirely possible for them both to overtake me, but I suspect it will be a good while before anyone else attempts to tackle this particular escapade. I wish then both well on their respective journies, but at least I am safe in the knowledge I was the first to break 1 year of daily consecutive CPAN uploads. Don't think I'll be trying it again though :)

A Celebration

Posted on 11th August 2014

August the 16th is CPAN Day. Its the day that is marked as the first upload to CPAN. CPAN came into existence in July/August 1995, but on August 16th 1995 Andreas König made the first true upload to the archive. And so began a growth that is continuing and growing to this day. Jumping ahead to several weeks ago, Neil Bowers decided to make a big deal about this day. After all we celebrate Perl's birthday, why not celebrate CPAN too.

Neil has been posting several ideas for how you can improve distributions on CPAN, with the aim of making several releases on CPAN Day. With that aim in mind, Neil posted some stats and graphs to show what has happened on CPAN Day in previous years. I did some data mining and came up with a page to help monitor CPAN Day. I sent the link to Neil, who then came up with several suggestions. Trying to create the graphs proved interesting, and thanks to everyone on Twitter who sent me various links to help out.

The page has expanded slightly and includes the neoCPANisms, which Neil has been monitoring. NeoCPANism being the number of new distributions that have never been uploaded to CPAN before. It will be interesting to see how many new distributions get released on CPAN Day, as the biggest day of new release was nearly 2 years ago, with 41 new distributions release on the same day.

The page is now created in real time (well every 5 minutes) so you can see how we're progressing throughout the day. The page is now available at stats.cpantesters.org/uploads.html. You can watch progress for each day now, not just CPAN Day, but let's see if we can reach the suggested target on Saturday :)

Sunshine Of Your Love

Posted on 17th July 2014

The survey results for YAPC::NA 2014 are now online.

Even we with lower numbers of attendees this year, 27% of you took the time to respond to the survey. As always, this doesn't necessarily allow us to see the whole picture, but hopefully it is enough of a cross-section of the attendees to help us improve future events. Once again we had a healthy number of respondees for whom this was their first YAPC, many having never attendeed a workshop either.

There was a bit of a mixed reaction throughout the survey. Although having read the feedback from the talk evaluations, there was a lot of positive comments, and several words of encouragement for some of the new speakers, which was great to see. Overall it seems to have been another great conference, although there are areas of communication that many felt could be improved.

I see I'll have to expand the options for the question "What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?", as firstly I would include hacking on Perl core, as part of a Perl project (i.e. a group of great people doing great work to improve Perl), but also to include a new option; I donate to one of the funds managed by TPF or EPO. During the conference I saw a few Twitter posts about contributing to some of the Perl funds, which I think came about following Dan Wright's presentation. It is great that so many have donated, big and small amounts, to the various funds. They all help to improve and promote Perl, and give us good reasons to continue putting together great conferences and workshops every year.

It was great to see any good list of suggestions for topics this year, and I hope that speakers new and old, get some ideas for future talks from them.

Lastly it does seem that the location question, really does depend where the current location is. The higher numbers last year may also indicate that Austin was easier to get to for most people, whereas a more easterly location, such as Florida, may restrict the ability to attend for those on the west coast. It would be interesting to see whether a similar opposite trend would result if the conference was held in Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah or Arizona. There must be several Perl Monger groups in those states, so if you're in one, perhaps think about balancing out the number of eatern hosting states ;)