Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

I'm a big fan of PHP's strtotime() so I wanted that same functionality in Perl. If you have a date/time string and need a unixtime, then strtotime() is the way to go.

I just released the first public version of Date::Parse::Modern, which is a modern replacement for Date::Parse. Not only does it support more formats than Date::Parse, it's also significantly faster.

In a perfect world this functionality (strtotime) should be in Time::Piece. It's very common in my work flow to read a log file and need to parse the date/time part of the line to a Unixtime.

New, powerful features have recently been added to PDF::Builder and PDF::Table, enabling faster and easier high-level generation of PDF documents. The versions are respectively 3.025 and 1.005, and are available on CPAN.

As well as the ability to "pour" text into a document's defined page areas, and have it flow easily over pages, this new version also enables high level text formatting with markup languages, as well as much-enhanced font management. The markup supports Markdown (via Text::Markdown) and a large (and growing) subset of HTML/CSS, as well as simple paragraphs-only markup, and for the first time can be used to format cells in PDF::Table. This is far from the final version, as many improvements are in the pipeline for this functionality, and are expected to be released over the coming one to two years. These will include, among other things, proper word hyphenation and probably some form of paragraph shaping, such as Knuth-Plass. The full list (at this time) is at https://github.com/PhilterPaper/Perl-PDF-Builder/issues/195 .

With my open source work, I’ve historically taken an approach which relies more on integration... Tagged with perl, tdd, test2suite.

Test2::V0 provides a good base to work with, so we add that to our project’s requirements list straight away.

We’ll round that out with:

Test2::Require::AuthorTesting to skip certain tests when run on the end user’s machine, and require the AUTHOR_TESTING environment variable to run. This is useful for tests which are very slow or require a highly specific environment to run in.
Test2::Require::Module to skip certain tests when optional modules are unavailable.
Test2::Tools::Spec to better structure our unit tests.
Test2::Plugin::BailOnFail for when your tests simply cannot carry on. Use sparingly.