A couple of things have happened recently which have highlighted ways I can slim things down a bit in terms of the number of things I need to keep track of and change the way I behave.
Thanks to homebrew, rvm, and MacVim I was well on my way to eliminating my use of VirtualBox for doing some of my own “tinkering” using a recent Ubuntu Linux as a familiar environment (I don’t have anything against Linux, it’s just less hassle for me not to have to start up a virtual machine to do some development…)
Ad a recent Toronto Perl Mongers meeting someone asked me about the modules I mentioned in a talk earlier this year and wondered if he could see the code. This had a cascade of effects:
- I put the code on GitHub so he could see it.
- I installed perlbrew and perl-5.12.1 on my Mac so I could start installing modules without breaking the system perl.
- I started updating some of the things I wanted to fix, but somehow hadn’t got around to fixing.
- I started goofing around with other Perl modules gratuitiously – for example using Moose to add a couple of attributes to a class despite its apparent ugliness, or common::sense rather than strict and warnings.
It’s amazing how the thought of other people’s eyes on my code are better motivators than my own diligence.
As the Toronto Perl Mongers web site generator was the only project of consequence I was doing on mu Linux VM I finally got to delete the old Linux VM and am now working in a pure OS X environment.
Using Moose has started slimming down my modules, as much of the boiler plate code seems to vanish.
My home tinkering environment has slimmed down, but I suspect the pitcher of beer and chicken fingers at the Perl Mongers meeting has caused some equal and opposite reaction in me!
