One of the defining characteristics of a good programmer is an instinct for keeping implementation details in the correct layer of an application. That sounds abstract, but it turns out to explain a huge amount of the progress we’ve made in software development over the last twenty-five years. And nowhere is that clearer than in […]
About eighteen months ago, I wrote a post called On the Bleading Edge about my decision to start using Perl’s new class feature in real code. I knew I was getting ahead of parts of the ecosystem. I knew there would be occasional pain. I decided the benefits were worth it. I still think that’s […]
Recently, Gabor ran a poll in a Perl Facebook community asking which version of Perl people used in their production systems. The results were eye-opening—and not in a good way. A surprisingly large number of developers replied with something along the lines of “whatever version is included with my OS.” If that’s you, this post […]
Earlier this week, I read a post from someone who failed a job interview because they used a hash slice in some sample code and the interviewer didn’t believe it would work. That’s not just wrong — it’s a teachable moment. Perl has several kinds of slices, and they’re all powerful tools for writing expressive, […]
Back in January, I wrote a blog post about adding JSON-LD to your web pages to make it easier for Google to understand what they were about. The example I used was my ReadABooker site, which encourages people to read more Booker Prize shortlisted novels (and to do so by buying them using my Amazon […]
