use Perl

I think we'll be adopting that as a name for the contestants - it rings nicely for me as a parallel to the way the specific triathlon in question is called Iron Man but the athletes themselves are simply referred to as triathletes

Look out for updates to the planet and site (and of course my blog since I'm due a post again) as I spend some time scripting various things up to support this.

This is ... already a solved problem. Sartak's plan outlined here allows you to basically lint the code to catch this sort of thing, without running into the huge problem you've just caused of LETTING A RANDOM ROLE SUDDENLY FUCK OVER YOUR CLASS.

I mean, a MetaRole type thing that made it an error on a class by class basis would be great. What you've just done is randomly added compile time errors at a distance, without warning. I can see this as being perhaps acceptable for internal codebases, but I'd strongly ask you to make it clear that this should not be used in roles that you intend to ship to CPAN since they enforce policy on the consumer - and unexpected exceptions just because a module's author disagrees with the module's user about semantics really just aren't in the spirit of perl.

Except Paul's feedback just said "change the title of the aggregator to 'Planet Perl Iron Man'". And actually, no, the reason she complained here rather than direct to me is that she assumed I wouldn't listen. Amazing how easily even the best of us can be messed over by implicit assumptions, eh :) - fortunately as I noted above, this ones now corrected and we're having what will hopefully be a very productive discussion via email.

The best way to raise awareness in the perl community would IMO have been to subscribe to Iron Man and make a first post roughly entitled "I care about getting the word out about female perl heads more than I do that Matt's a sexist bastard, and here's why". And I'm currently, in between discussing what language changes we can make to be more inclusive without resorting to weasel words, trying to convince her to do exactly that - the perl community has spent too long not having strong opinions in case it treads on other people's toes, and I'm hoping that if she chooses to join the competition she'll offer more well written dissent on other topics as well.

Oh, and I was there when the award was presented and when PJF went up to collect it on her behalf, and I applauded like hell for the work she'd done - I just hadn't connected the realname and the nick. Which, admittedly, was fucking retarded on my part, but y'know, welcome to being human.

I hadn't made the connection - I've only ever seen the nick 'jarich' on identi.ca and then here complaining about this. I was enlightened fairly shortly after I posted -

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:26:42AM +0930, Paul Fenwick wrote:
> G'day Matt,
>
> Matt S Trout wrote:
> > pjf is jarich's husband :)
> >
> > shit.
>
> Oh my! I think that's the closest I've ever come to death from laughter. ;)
>
> Jacinta's e-mail address is (redacted, fuck you spambots), although it looks
> like she's writing out a friendly and explanatory e-mail to you now.

And indeed she has, and we're now having the nice, constructive discussion over further feedback from her via e-mail that I wish had happened in the first place.

jarich++

Your problem was trying to do dynamic subclassing of DBIx::Class result classes. The first result for 'dbix class subclass' on search.cpan.org solved your problem as stated. I'm sorry that was too hard to find for you.

Hopefully your co-workers are capable of typing three words into a search box in less than a day and a half. They'll be welcome on #dbix-class if that doesn't solve their problem.

You no longer are. So shut up and fuck off.

(and I would echo the apology for the thread hijack, but apparently quoting your typical "let's accuse the guy who expected me to RTFM of not having a life outside of IRC" attitude wasn't sufficient to make the point)

In order to minimise the future noise caused by your inability to use a search box or to deal with people's frustration with said without resorting to insulting us, our attitudes, our professionalism and our personal lives, I will not be responding to you again, here or anywhere else.

*PLONK*

(ten minutes after my prior comment)

It occurs to me that my previous comment appears to be blaming Paul for what we did.

It isn't.

It's pointing out that among his several pages of constructive bitching, at least half of the points in which we've now addressed and the rest we're trying to as volunteers' time provides, the lack of female badges was one of them, and this is what we did about it given the resources available.

I take full and absolute responsibility for any and every gender related issue involved in the Iron Man competition. The decisions were all mine, and I am comfortable with them - and if you want to hate me for them, do feel free.

But Paul, and Jess, and Gerda Shank, and others, provided useful feedback direct to me and to the other organisers. You, instead, chose to complain in a public forum about how the contest was exclusive and you refused to take part, without ever contacting the organisers and explaining your reservations and seeing if we were able to find something we could do about them.

I'm sorry you think that public complaining that I just happened to come across thanks to Jess is a more useful contribution to open source marketing than a suitable bug report to the authors of this scheme. I'm not sorry you aren't taking part; this competition is for people who want to do something for perl, who want to collaborate and help each other achieve a better marketing image for our language, not for people who think that public complaining without bothering to speak to the people or contacting the organisers or maintainers you're complaining about is a net positive.

You just stood up as a representative of every person who has ever posted "$module is shit" on a public message board without ever mailing the CPAN RT queue. I gave you an email address. I'm fucking obvious on IRC or you wouldn't have used my nickname in your post. But no, rather than saying "well done for making a start, can we fix @these things" like Paul did ,you just complain here without ever talking to me, without even trying to open a dialogue.

Well, fuck you. You're part of the problem.

So if you don't believe in this, let the people who actually give a flying fuck about community and collaboration, the people who've meant we're pushing seventy five signups so far and five more every day since I announced it, get on with marketing our language, with showing the world that perl isn't the pissy, insular, self hating dead system half the world thinks it is.

And if you change your mind, then please do mail your grievances to ironman at shadowcat.co.uk where I'll still be as willing to respond to them in a constructive fashion as I always was, and perhaps the next public statement from both of us can be "bug resolved" like I love to for the CPAN modules I help look after. Maybe you could talk to me and we can collaborate. Or you can just bitch here some more and I'll listen and laugh it off just like I do every other person who would rather complain than help, rather ad hominem than try diplomacy, rather put down and blame than try to find a way forwards.

The choice is yours. I'd much rather you'd have chosen to email me in the first place so we could have discussed this, but apparently that was too much to hope for.

Yours, more interested in a better future than complaining to the ether about the present, mst

bennymac2: why is every question I ask so fucking onerous?
mst: because they're all questions you could have answered using google or search.cpan with words that are in your question
mst: in spite of the questions almost invariably being extremely vague
bennymac2: i don't know man.. i think you just get a kick out of it. go get laid or something. get some sunshine. unplug for a bit.

And then you quit. I'm sorry you find doing basic research before asking the community for help onerous, and both my fiancee and my girlfriend would disagree about the "get laid" and "get some sunshine" part. I'm sorry you find being a help vampire better than showing a modicum of respect to the experts helping you for free, but that's your problem, not mine - maybe your comment that "bennymac2: I seem to be a magnet for that type of response" is an indication that the problem is yours, not ours.

And even if it isn't really, every single serious helper of newbies that's turned up on the IRC channels I work on in the past three years is still here - because I prevent them suffering support burnout caused by ignorant, disrespectful, unwilling to learn people like you. And maybe that makes me a failure at "inter-person behaviour", but it makes us able to help more newbies more of the time. And I'm comfortable with that.

Hope That Helps. Have A Nice Day.

I had a couple of enquiries if there'd be * Woman badges as well for those who wanted, and of course there will be - but Mark Keating (who did the original set as a sort of pre-announce publicity thing) was away on holiday at our friend Jane's wedding, so didn't have time to create all of them. I should probably have waited, but I was asked by Paul Fenwick, for whom I have the utmost respect for his work on changelogging for perl core, (along with his choice to sign up to the competition :), to provide "(Paper|Stone|Bronze|Iron) Woman badges" - so given the competition hadn't been running long enough for anybody to earn any badge but paper I asked Mark to try and take time away from Jane's festivities to produce at least the Paper Woman so we could ensure that parity was observed, with the knowledge that he'd be back in the UK in time for the rest to be produced before anybody of either gender achieved them.

I am extremely sorry for any offence caused by the disparity between the pre-announce and the limited response we were able to provide in response to Paul's feedback without disrupting our friend's wedding, and hope that you'll be kind enough to forgive us for it provided we have blog appropriate Stone, Bronze and Iron Woman badges by the time the contest has been running long enough for those to be earned.

Any hate mail on the subject can be sent to mst (@) shadowcat.co.uk - or made as a reply here.

Part two of the TODO Manager article series is up - Database and Domain Design is available here, in which I don my gear and go exploring in the barren wastes of confusion and spite with only a one-page wiki spec as a map, seeking the one true design for my domain that will allow me to build an app atop it that meets the requirements in full.

Comments, as usual, live here.

So, I've decided that if I'm going to be building the Vienna WoC TODO Manager app as a public example project, the development might be public as well in the form of a series of articles on the Shadowcat site; I'll be posting summary+link here so people can comment (and a link from the Shadowcat site to the comments, of course).

The Table of Contents and Introduction are already up; comments on the story so far welcome

For those of you unable to find the link, the RSS feed is here