Pittsburg Perl Workshop and Stuff

So this past weekend was neat. I love coming to workshops even if it is a very compressed time frame. My take away from this workshop is that I have wanted to do some hardware hacking for quite sometime, but never got around to purchasing an arduino board with some addons. So perhaps in the next few months I'll start working on something. Something network-enabled and practical. We'll see. Not that there is any direct Perl that is running on these boards (the code is some kind of C-derivative with a compiler/IDE), but you can use Perl to talk to it over a serial port or whatever.

And while I had set off to write a POE::Filter that spoke the Minecraft SMP protocol this weekend, it never materialized. Instead, I started working on modernizing yet another one of my modules: POE::Filter::XML::RPC. The problem is that I am subclassing XML::LibXML::Element and it doesn't play nice with subclassing. So I wanted to extend it, using Moose and advise all of the methods I could find that returned other Elements or Nodes. That was going to be a very very large copy/paste job. MooseX::Declare didn't support shortcut method modifiers (around [qw/foo bar baz/] {...}). So last night and this morning, I hacked that support into MooseX::Method::Signatures (and its use is transparent to MooseX::Declare). All so I could have a single line of copy paste instead of a lot more. I'm so god damn lazy sometimes.

And interesting side effect of adding this functionality into MXMS: you can have stringified array references as method names, heh. In MXD, the declarators are given specific meaning and functionality via callbacks so that the array references are absorbed and passed on to the meta munging methods that add the method modifications.

Anyhow, I've made the pull requests to rafl, and just waiting for him to incorporate and release.

If anyone is ever on the fence on whether or not to attend Perl workshops, let me settle that for you: GO. It is an awesome time. Everything from learning to networking opportunities await any avid Perl programmer. And this gave me ideas for next year's set of talks that I need to write (I didn't speak at this workshop, I was all tuckered out from speaking earlier in the year).

Hope to see new faces at OPW in January.