That was the month that was

Originally published on 5 December 2008 by Carl Mäsak.

This post is the closing bracket to that post.

For one month, I posted every seventh or eighth entry on use.perl, on average. It was a lot of work, but it was fun. It helped November forward quite a bit, too. (No, I won’t write “November the wiki” when there’s no risk of confusion. ☺) After doing that, I took a few days’ vacation. Now I’m back to blogging, but at a less hectic pace; maybe semi-weekly or so.

I have a Raku trick that I want to write about, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Today I’ll just write this month summary: what historical event I wrote about on each day, what I did that day, and what I did overall compared to what I said I’d do in the beginning.

Every day, I surfed to Wikipedia to find some historical event that happened on that day, and which captured my interest. Here are the themes that apparently interest me:

(I can’t help noticing how Western this list of events is. This is the first time that a Wikipedia bias has really struck me — I think I’m going to partly counteract this by finding a few tens of notable non-Western events and adding them to the “events on this date” lists on Wikipedia.)

Here’s what I did on the same days, in terms of November, Rakudo or Raku improvements.

Finally, here are the things I promised I’d do, annotated with comments on what I’ve done:

Create three nice-looking layouts, which can all be used in p6w.

I created one really nice-looking layout for p5w, but I still haven’t ported it to p6w. mpeters++ contributed a second layout.

Read a synopsis. I’ve re-read and enjoyed S02, S04, and S09. Haven’t blogged about it, though.
Give S29 some much-needed love.

Only started doing this, by writing about .fmt — plan to do a lot more.

Add or curate tests from the Perl test suite.

I’ve hardly touched the Raku test suite. moritz++ for doing it a lot, though.

Implement a feature in Rakudo.

Not as many as I’d like, but a few.

Triage Rakudo tickets in the Perl RT system.

I’ve mostly just been creating them. ☺

Implement MD5 digesting in Raku.

This remains a problem slightly above my programming ability. I’ve written the algorithm, but it doesn’t produce the results it’s supposed to. I’m stuck.

Add features to p6w that p5w already has. (article history, diffs)

Nope. Still a good idea, though. I’m surprised I didn’t mention MediaWiki parsing among the features I was planning to implement, because that part of November is the real winner from the efforts of my one-month spree.

Blog about the architecture of November.

To some degree, yes. Can be done to a greater degree in the future.

Blog about cool things in Raku and Rakudo.

Actually, I’ve only been blogging about bugs in Rakudo… but I hope I am able to communicate, through most of my posts, my feeling that Raku is awesome. If not, I probably wouldn’t keep doing what I’m doing.

Add POD documentation to PIR subs and methods in Rakudo.

No. Still a great idea, though. The exact implementation of things may change, but good documentation is valuable.

Looking over those results, I’m both a bit proud of the things I did do, and eager to improve on the things I didn’t. I guess that’s the way it should be.