Best. November. EVER.

The Raku Programming Language Collect, Conserve and Remaster Project

Best. November. EVER.

Originally published on 9 December 2010 by Carl Mäsak.

*"Focusing on quantity rather than quality, that's what you Perl people tend to do, right?"* — one of my colleagues

During November, I blogged 33 times while everybody else combined on Planet Raku blogged 7 times, making me 82.5% ubiquitous on that blog aggregator. After that exhausting sprint, I released Yapsi and then took a well-needed week-long vacation. Now I’m back to blogging. Hi.

It’s time to look back at the month and see how it went. This is the third and final year I make a whole month of November. 2009 and 2008 also have summaries like this one.

Every day, I trawled Wikipedia for something interesting that happened on that day in history. This year, these were the topics that fell out of those investigations:

I think I managed to strike a pretty good balance between Western and non-Western this time. I also think this year has a lot more about war, battles, and conflicts than previous years. I don’t think there’s a deeper reason for that. Except perhaps that the historical things on Wikipedia tend to be about war, battles, and conflicts. Maybe even news in general tends to be about that, come to think of it.

Here’s what I worked on during the month:

I see I had fewer days of “distracted” than I thought I did. Huh, I see I was surprised about that last year as well. Must be some psychological bias involved.

It’s fun to track my acclimatization into the Raku community through the three Novembers of 2008, 2009, and 2010. The first year I was able to focus quite exclusively on November-the-wiki-engine, as that was my only project. The second year that wasn’t an option, due to the explosive proliferation of projects I had amassed. This year, I still have a lot of projects going, but thankfully the number has stopped increasing as rapidly as it did in 2009. There’s still a lot to hack on — let’s just say I’m never bored and wondering what to do next — but the projects are sort of settling and growing a bit more mature and easier to handle. I like that.

I’m still not so comfortable with Rakudo that I can jump into any part of it and hack around, but at least I’m no stranger to the setting nowadays. I still want to learn more about how the rest of Rakudo works, but there’s a clear upward trend through all the three November months of the amount of work I put into Rakudo itself. At this point, I’ve even touched the C parts and survived!

Here’s a lineup of the things I set out to do:

Did not do this. But I learned that this should be done with alpha, not with ng.

Done. Kinda. Some quirks left.

Partway there.

Nope, since I didn’t get the previous point done.

An excellent suggestion. Did not do this.

This I did.

Nope. Still a good idea.

Partway there.

As usual, it’s a mix of unfulfilled wishes and some work that I actually did get done. Actually, I did more work on November itself than I thought I would, which makes me happy.

Things I worked on but didn’t plan to work on:

Phew!

So now, I guess, it’s back to normal. I’ll try to get back to the things I didn’t do this November. In either case, I won’t bombard you with quite as many blog posts.