This post is the closing curly of that post.

During November, my daily updates constituted every fourth or fifth blog post on use.perl, on average. (That's a decrease from last year's seven or eight. Still, not as bad as I'd thought, given this year's exodus from use.perl.) After enjoying a few days of blissful silence, I'm now back in the blogging saddle.

Every day, I surfed to Wikipedia to find some historical event that happened on that day, and which captured my interest. I guess it says something interesting about my inner life that these were the topics I settled on:

1. Lisbon earthquake
2. Largest squid ever
3. Gentleman thieves
4. President Obama
5. Third-term president Roosevelt
6. Plutonium created
7. Suez Crisis
8. Stockholm Bloodbath
9. Berlin Wall fall redux!
10. Sesame Street
11. Famous Australian outlaw hanged
12. Tibet attacking China capital!
13. Town flooded by high-velocity mud
14. Apollo 12 liftoff
15. Hyperinflation
16. Whitewashing Nazi scientists' pasts
17. Dalai Lama
18. King of Denmark in a pinch
19. Reagan meets Горбачёв
20. Sweden, outnumbered, wins a battle
21. Port Arthur massacre
22. 10-year old girl makes history
23. UN: China (PRC) in, China (ROC) out
24. Plane hijacker jumps, disappears
25. Suriname gains full independence
26. Russia bombs itself, blames Finland
27. Crashing on Mars
28. New Zealand women vote
29. Ship crew murders slaves
30. Meteorite strikes woman

(It's hard to summarize the above list in any meaningful way. I made an observation yesteryear about how Western the list of events turned out. I think I fared slightly better this year, even though the bias is clearly on the dark blue areas still. I also made an ambitious promise last year, to infiltrate Wikipedia with "tens of notable non-Western events" that I could then use for this year. At this, I confess, I failed completely. It still seems a good idea, though; maybe something for next year?)

Here's what I worked on during the days of the month, in terms of contributions to different projects:

1. [November] un-bitrotting
2. [November] server care
3. [Temporal] Tuesday!
4. [November] debugging; login problems
5. [proto] installed-modules
6. [proto] installed-modules
7. [proto] installed-modules
8. [proto] installed-modules
9. [proto] installed-modules
10. [Temporal] Tuesday!
11. [November] debugging; login problems
12. distracted; mst++ discussion
13. [Web.pm] pastebin
14. [Rakudo] tiny documentation bugfix
15. [November] fix nightly smokes
16. [November] fix lichtkindbugs
17. [Temporal] Tuesday!
18. [November] fix lichtkindbugs
19. [Rakudo] release [POST WAS LATE]
20. [Rakudo] setting fix
21. distracted; attended BPW
22. [Rakudo] ng branch
23. [Emmentaler] web page sketch
24. [Community] guide Wolfman2000++
25. [Web.pm] Astaire
26. [Themporal] Thursday!
27. [book] Poker hand example
28. [Community] perlmonks question
29. [GGE] debugging/workarounds
30. [tote] ramble

One big difference stands out immediately from last year: my attention is much more split up on different things these days. And no wonder; a year ago I'd only just started working on Druid, which I consider to be my second Perl 6 project after November. 2009 saw the addition of proto, SVG, Web.pm, GGE, and many smaller ones to that list, all of which have to fight for my attention.

Also new for this year, probably for similar reasons, is that I not only blogged my November posts each day, but got in three other posts about various things, as well as a Web.pm grant week report. So the total is actually 34 posts last month.

Due to being abroad without a battery charger, I missed one day. This is a sad blemish to my otherwise immaculate record; my only consolation is that no-one else seems to care.

Also, I'm surprised to see that I have about the same amount (2) of days-of-distractedness as last year (3). It felt like there were more this year. Perhaps I'm merely getting better at doing something really minimal and calling that a contribution. ☺

Now let's see how I fared with the things I set out to do.

• Create some nice layouts for November.

  Never got around to that. It seems I have trouble getting started on making new layouts. I had the same trouble last year, when I set out to make one each week and only made one.

   

• Add features to November. (Notably, page diffs.)

  Added (back) the page history feature, which nevertheless doesn't work yet. No page diffs. Actually, I guess I could have spent much more time actually *developing* November, but... I chose to do other stuff.

   

• Make all the tests pass again in November.

  Done.

   

• Expand the November nightly smokes to... Emmentaler.

  Nope. Blocking on the next item.

   

• Make the installed-modules branch land.

  Started in on that. Still some ways to go.

   

• Join in the fun of the Rakudo ng branch.

  Yes, once. It was indeed fun.

   

• Experiment with putting November on Web.pm.

  Nope. During the month, one Web.pm grant blog post got posted. Still have one left.

   

Things not on the list-of-things-to-do (but which probably should have been), that I did anyway:

• Temporal flux!
• some Web.pm work
• the Perl 6 book
• tote
• a few community matters

I'm very glad I did another month-of-November. They are tiring, but strangely rewarding. And looking back, there's no question that they actually push things forward.

And with that, we're done! (Now, let's just land the installed-modules branch, finish up the Temporal flux, implement Emmentaler and tote, finish the Perl 6 book, add those missing features and layouts to November, and release Rakudo Star, the most stellar Perl 6 release in history!)

I'm very excited about where Perl 6, Rakudo and the community is going. Exciting to think where we'll be in a year or so.