1. Things I Learned From Having Users

2. Dave Cross [email_address]

3. It's 10 Years Since I Got A CPAN Account

4. April 29 2000

5. Array::Compare 0.01

6. It's a pretty pointless module

7. Comparing arrays using a ridiculous algorithm

8. My second module on CPAN was Symbol::Approx::Sub

9. There may be a theme developing here

10. I now have 24 distributions on CPAN

11. Array::Compare AudioFile::Info AudioFile::Info::MP3::ID3Lib Audiofile::Info::MP3::Info AudioFile::Info::MP3::Tag AudioFile::Info::Ogg::Vorbis::Header AudioFile::Info::Ogg::Vorbis::Header::PurePerl Calendar::Simple Guardian::OpenPlatform::API Net::Backpack Number::Fraction Parse::RPM::Spec Perlanet Symbol::Approx::Sub Template::Plugin::AudioFile::Info Template::Plugin::RPM2 Template::Plugin::XML::Feed Tie::Hash::Cannabinol Tie::Hash::FixedKeys Tie::Hash::Regex WWW::Shorten WWW::Shorten::Qurl WWW::Shorten::Qwer WWW::Shorten::SnipURL

12. Most of them have tiny numbers of users

13. Having few users is good

14. Users are a problem

15. Users report bugs

16. Users suggest enhancements

17. Users expect you to listen to them

18. Writing unpopular modules is good

19. You can release what you want

20. You can release when you want

21. You can completely change the interface

22. (Users don't like that)

23. On the other hand

24. Users make suggestions that you would never have thought of

25. Users use your code in new and interesting ways

26. Users test your code for you

27. Users report problems

28. Users supply failing tests

29. Users write patches

30. Users are good!

31. Embrace your users

32. But!

33. Popularity brings problems

34. Too many active users

35. Too many bug reports

36. (Why are you releasing buggy code?)

37. Too many bug reports

38. Too many bug reports

39. Too many enhancement requests

40. Use the tools

41. CPAN has a great infrastructure

42. Distribution is handled for you

43. Testing is handled for you

44. Cross-platform testing is handled for you

45. Bug tracking is handled for you

46. Every CPAN module gets its own RT queue

47. rt.cpan.org

48. Add that to your documentation

49. To report bugs in Perlanet, please use the CPAN request tracker. You can either use the web page at http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Perlanet or send an email to bug-Perlanet@rt.cpan.org.

50. All bugs get automatically stored in RT

51. It won't work

52. AUTHOR Dave Cross, <dave@mag-sol.com>

53. To report bugs in Perlanet, please use the CPAN request tracker. You can either use the web page at http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Perlanet or send an email to bug-Perlanet@rt.cpan.org.

54. TLDR

55. AUTHOR Dave Cross, <dave@mag-sol.com>

56. Install the Redirect add-on for Thunderbird

57. Install the Redirect add-on for Thunderbird * Dave's Top Tip

58. Or use the bounce key in Mutt

59. Send your own bugs to RT

60. Use RT to remember everything you need to do to your modules

61. Use RT to remember everything you want to do to your modules

62. Some examples

63. Example 1: Moose

64. Moose is good

65. I started to Moosify my modules

66. Remember Array::Compare?

67. The module that no-one used

68. I got a bug report

69. Bug #49270 for Array-Compare: Remove the use of Moose

70. Padre project was unhappy

71. Moose was slowing their performance

72. I thought about it

73. I blogged about it

74. Other people blogged about it

75. In the end I did nothing

76. Source code is on Github

77. Feel free to fork it

78. Moral:

79. The user is not always right

80. Example 2: Net::Backpack

81. Backpack from 37 Signals

82. Personal information manager

83. With an API

84. Net::Backpack

85. It's a big API

86. I got bored

87. Release early Release often

88. Released a partial implementation

89. Someone found it useful

90. Sent a patch completing the implementation

91. Yay neshura!

92. Example 3: Perlanet

93. Perlanet is a web feed aggregator

94. Wrote it because I didn't want to hack Python

95. And Plagger was too complex for me to understand

96. So Perlanet is really simple

97. Too simple

98. Users have weird use cases

99. Users have weird use cases

100. Users have unexpected use cases

101. Alex Kapranoff (kappa)

102. perlplanet.ru

103. Cyrillic

104. Кириллица

105. Lots of Unicode bugs

106. kappa didn't complain

107. kappa forked Github repo

108. kappa fixed the bugs

109. kappa sent a pull request

110. kappa++

111. Planet Iron Man

112. Originally used Plagger

113. Wanted to switch to Perlanet

114. YAML configuration

115. Simple

116. Doesn't scale

117. North West England Perl Mongers

118. Hackfest

119. Many improvements

120. More subclassable

121. Github pull request

122. Everybody wins

123. In summary

124. Writing software just for yourself is fun

125. Writing software for users is better

126. Seeing your software being used is great

127. Getting feedback about your software is great

128. Users supply bugs

129. Users supply patches

130. Users supply new ideas

131. Users supply insight

132. Users appreciate your work

133. But best of all

134. Some users show their appreciation...

135. By buying you beer