App::HTTPThis: the tiny web server I keep reaching for

I *heart* http_this

Whenever I’m building a static website, I almost never start by reaching for Apache, nginx, Docker, or anything that feels like “proper infrastructure”. Nine times out of ten I just want a directory served over HTTP so I can click around, test routes, check assets, and see what happens in a real browser. For that […]

Behind the scenes at Perl School Publishing

Designing a new publication pipeline

We’ve just published a new Perl School book: Design Patterns in Modern Perl by Mohammad Sajid Anwar. It’s been a while since we last released a new title, and in the meantime, the world of eBooks has moved on – Amazon don’t use .mobi any more, tools have changed, and my old “it mostly works […]

Dotcom Survivor Syndrome – How Perl’s Early Success Created the Seeds of Its Downfall

Dotcom Survivor Syndrome

If you were building web applications during the first dot-com boom, chances are you wrote Perl. And if you’re now a CTO, tech lead, or senior architect, you may instinctively steer teams away from it—even if you can’t quite explain why. This reflexive aversion isn’t just a preference. It’s what I call Dotcom Survivor Syndrome: […]

Elderly Camels in the Cloud

Elderly cloud camel

In last week’s post I showed how to run a modern Dancer2 app on Google Cloud Run. That’s lovely if your codebase already speaks PSGI and lives in a nice, testable, framework-shaped box. But that’s not where a lot of Perl lives. Plenty of useful Perl on the internet is still stuck in old-school CGI […]

Dancing in the Clouds: Moving Dancer2 Apps from a VPS to Cloud Run

Dancing in the Clouds

For years, most of my Perl web apps lived happily enough on a VPS. I had full control of the box, I could install whatever I liked, and I knew where everything lived. In fact, over the last eighteen months or so, I wrote a series of blog posts explaining how I developed a system […]