I like to ward off my natural dull stale bluntitude by poking around in the odd corners of perl to see what slithers out. Trying experimental features is one easy source of that. I think most programmers agree that the best way to learn Perl - or any language - is to write some and see what breaks.

That was how I stumbled into writing Tie::Constrained. I was playing with the experimental :lvalue subs, and noticed claims that validation was impossible with them. Taking that as a challenge, a little thought persuaded me that validation needed to be wedged into assignment. The only way I found to do that was with a tie'd variable. The demonstration I wrote had a simple tied class module that proved to be a really versatile way of handling dynamic typing, among other things. It has nothing to do with lvalue subs anymore, but I would have never written it without my pushing at the edges of perl.

For CPAN module info, I do frequent i /foo/ queries in the CPAN shell for any term, library, or acronym which has caught my attention. The CPAN shell readme is a good first indicator of quality, and if it looks interesting I'll get the module and check the source.