Hey everyone -

In case you haven't heard, Stratopan just went public yesterday! I am
really excited about this because it means reproducible code is now much,
much easier to achieve in Perl.

One of the major issues with my scientific code is that I frequently put
developing modules to use before they're ready. A prime example of this is
PDL::Graphics::Prima, which has (not surprisingly) undergone some backwards
incompatible changes since I started working on it back in January, 2011.
It's great to really test it out in live scientific code, but it sucks when
I have to go back and clean up a large collection of scripts when I change
the API.

Well, Jeffrey Thalhammer, developer of Perl::Critic, has developed a system
for creating hand-currated private CPANs called Pinto. Just yesterday he
opened up a new service called Stratopan that runs a Pinto service in the
cloud.

To give you a flavor for how useful this can be, if I had an account on
Stratopan back in 2011, I could have uploaded my nascent
PDL::Graphics::Prima to a a stratopan stack. It would have pulled in all
necessary dependencies from CPAN and saved them. It will keep its own stash
of those distributions so that, when we fast forward to the present, I
could re-install that set of modules with a simple

cpanm --mirror-only --mirror https://
stratopan.com/dcmertens/PDL-Graphics-Prima/master PDL-Graphics-Prima
(Note, I'd probably need to set up my local::lib to install everything to a
project-specific folder. But that's an exercise left to the reader.)

In short, if you find yourself developing a module that you want to use in
your science, and if you have any suspicion that it might change in the
future, build a Stratopan stack for it and future-proof your work.

If you find this interesting, you should sign up now. I suspect that
Stratopan will always have some sort of free account option, but early
adopters are likely to get the best deals for free storage with this system.

David

-- 
 "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
  by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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