Learning to play with Catalyst

Yeah, I know I haven't posted in three weeks, almost. So sue me. :)

I just got a job developing a web application in Perl. And since all the cool kids are using Catalyst for web development these days, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.

So this thing I'm developing has an Oracle backend. First of all, let me say that Oracle has been regularly pissing me off for various reasons. Chief among them right now is the 30 character limit on identifiers, so if I name a constraint (which is a good thing to be doing) it has to be under 30 characters.

Anyway, Catalyst has this nifty bit whereby it will automatically generate table classes, or "source classes", in DBIC parlance (for use by DBIx::Class::Schema) for you. And this is really cool and timesaving. However, it does not, so far as I've been able to tell, automatically populate the hash generated by DBIx::Class::ResultSource->column_info from the table structure in the database. That bit you have to do by hand, unfortunately. It will do constraints, however, which makes up for that in part. One thing to note about constraints - you have to access the constraints by their names, not by the columns they're defined on. So if you have a table with a field 'login', you can't specify {key => 'login'} in a call to DBIx::Class::ResultSet->find. It took me a good half day to figure that one out. :)

How do we make KC a startup hub?

That's actually not the question I want answered. What I want to know is how do we create an environment that is not only positive, but welcoming of new ideas and new knowledge? How do we make KC a place where geeks of all sorts can thrive?

I think that Christa, who commented in my previous post, has the right idea. Things like PodCamp Midwest, which I'm sorry I wasn't able to attend. Things like the Hack Day that I'm organizing in a month's time. Things like The Kansas City Area Software Demonstration Project Meetup, which I will be attending. Hell, just geeks getting together for a beer, or coffee, or whatnot. We need a geeky community in this town.

But that's only the first step. Because we need to bring new geeks into the fold. We need fresh ideas. We need to make KC a place where the geeks want to be, and I'm afraid BBQ and roller derby aren't enough.

Thinking about startups

I just saw a new post by Paul Graham on Reddit today. After I read it, I went back through the archives and re-read Why to Move to a Startup Hub. And this got me thinking.

As far as I know, KC does not have a lot of tech startups. Admittedly, I could be wrong, as I don't know a lot of the local geeky types here, but that's the impression that I get. We're certainly not Silicon Valley or Boston, the two hubs mentioned in Graham's essay. And that's fine. I like KC just as it is, wacky government follies (Inez Tenenbaum and the whole thing with the commissioners of police being appointed by the state legislature), urban flight, and all.

That said, somebody tell me why KC can't be a startup hub. We've got cheap housing in the city (I'm paying $600 for a 2-bedroom place, for example). We've got all these neat-o limestone caves that make for a great place to put a datacenter. We've got great coffee. We've got barbecue out the proverbial wazoo, and lots of vegetarian options to boot. I don't know how conducive Kansas or Missouri law are to forming startups, but I'm sure someone knows - and laws can always be changed.

So let's not accept SF and Boston as the country's only startup hubs. Let's show the world that there's more to Kansas City than jazz and barbecue. Let's show the world just how many smart people are here in Kansas City, and who are going to stay in Kansas City. I don't want to bring Mohammed to the mountain. I want to bring the mountain to Mohammed.

To that end, I'm proposing a hack day - a day for smart folks to get together, share ideas, and work on those ideas. You don't have to be a programmer, or even a computer geek - those are just skills, skills you can learn. Just bring yourself, bring your brain, and bring all the ideas you have; the crazier the better. Let's set the date for a month from now, March 15, and place and time yet to be determined.

Come on, folks. Let's show the world what KC is made of.