During November, I blogged 33 times while everybody else combined on Planet Perl 6 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:

1. US-backed coups against foreign leaders
2. Philippine governors
3. Fiat currency reform in Nationalist China
4. Overflowing Italian rivers
5. Ancient Indian battles
6. UN resolutions against South Africa apartheid
7. Collapsing bridges
8. Nazi exhibitions about Jews
9. The end of the Japanese shogunate
10. Spanish kings telling Venezuelan presidents to shut up
11. The Royal navy and Somalian pirates
12. Military strikes against emus in Australia
13. Steamships catching fire
14. Going around the world in 72 days
15. Empress Dowager Cixi
16. Estonia's first steps towards independence
17. Peaceful protests in Prague
18. Khrushchev telling the West it'll be buried
19. Mutual annihilation in a WWII sea battle
20. Whaleships being attacked by a whale
21. First hot air balloon untethered flight
22. Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek meeting up
23. Invention of theater
24. Cowardly terrorists
25. Macbeth
26. Bombing of a Woolworths store in London
27. Christian Crusades
28. Piano concerto premieres
29. Partitioning of Palestine
30. Exiled leaders of colonial states

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:

1. [Yapsi/Tardis]
2. [pls] de-bitrotting
3. [psyde] optimization
4. distracted by Vienna
5. [psyde] esthetics
6. [psyde] optimization
7. [Rakudo] .trans
8. [Druid] porting to new Rakudo
9. [Druid/Rakudo] nibbling
10. [Yapsi] discussing
11. [Yapsi] planning
12. [pls] test-assisted hacking
13. [Shrdlu] porting to new Rakudo
14. [Yapsi] closures
15. [November] porting to new Rakudo
16. [November] Perl 6 spec discussion
17. [November] .trans trouble
18. [Rakudo] release
19. [Rakudo] .trans patch discussion
20. [November] .trans trouble
21. [November] interpolation trouble
22. [November] porting to new Rakudo
23. [November] cache confusion
24. [November] cache confusion
25. [November] .trans trouble
26. [Web.pm] research
27. distracted; reinstalled ghostscript
28. [Web.pm] Hitomi tests
29. [Web.pm] Routes, Astaire, Squerl
30. [Rakudo] comparing November on alpha vs ng

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 Perl 6 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:

• Make an effort to get November running again as a service on feather.

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

• Make November work under Rakudo master.

  Done. Kinda. Some quirks left.

• Finish the last week of the Web.pm grant.

  Partway there.

• Make Web.pm work under Rakudo master.

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

• Experiment with making November work with (parts of Web.pm).

  An excellent suggestion. Did not do this.

• Work on Psyde, the static web engine that runs this blog.

  This I did.

• Investigate a common pandoc-like markup converter that could serve both November and Psyde.

  Nope. Still a good idea.

• Finish the module installer pls, such that it installs the whole ecosystem.

  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:

• Rakudo (.trans)
• Yapsi
• Tardis

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.