Notes from MPLS Perl Mongers

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers met last night. The speaker was none other than Andy Lester. His comments on the event can be seen at use.perl.org.

Here are my very sparse notes.

• Keep testing simple, constantly, extensively. Make it part of the culture.
• if it's pain to write no will write and maintain them.
• smoke script, smoke bots
• human testing doesn't scale
• don't write untestable code
• code review must include test files
• Check out Junit, Test::Class, Xunit
• Need to look at WWW:Mechanize and the Test::* hierarchy

The most interesting meta-topic was how to find modules on CPAN and how one might find groups of modules that might work well together. I think this topic has been disussed numerous times in the Perl community and there have been a lot of ideas. Last night's idea was a spin on social networking where people would indentify which modules they use, and then share. This would work alot of the FOAF stuff or maybe the social networking websites. The idea is a lot like the amazon feature where you see "People who liked this book also purchased this book."

I think you could actually adopt FOAF for this purpose. Instead of filling in the friends with names they are modules. Then people could upload them, or publish them somewhere on the web and viola we could all share CPAN data. It's pretty clever actually. Here is an example I made in foaf-a-matic which was slightly edited to remove the field I didn't use Friends Email. I think this could work quite easily.

<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
<foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
  <foaf:maker rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
  <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
</foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
<foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="me">
<foaf:name>tim burlowski</foaf:name>
<foaf:givenname>tim</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>burlowski</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:nick>timbu</foaf:nick>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>96a89b9e488e2af86f950313a1c0d1e6956dc7f2</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://timbu.org/mtblog"/>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Text::Format</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Yahoo::StockQuote</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>DBI</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows></foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

The best part of Andy's talk was to listen to someone who seemed happy, engaged, and actually cared about something. I remember feeling this way about technology a while back.