Category: Programming

  • Hacking Symbol::Approx::Sub

    Hacking Symbol::Approx::Sub

    In October, for (I think) the second year, Digital Ocean ran Hacktoberfest – a campaign encouraging people to submit pull requests to Github repos in exchange for free t-shirts. A few of us thought that this might be a good way to do a small bit of easy Perl advocacy, so we tagged some issues…

  • Code Archaeology

    Code Archaeology

    Long-time readers will have seen some older posts where I criticised Perl code that I’ve found in various places on the web. I thought it was about time that I admitted to some of the dodgier corners of my programming career. You may know that one of my hobbies is genealogy. You might also know…

  • Easy PSGI

    When I write replies to questions on StackOverflow and places like that recommending that people abandon CGI programs in favour of something that uses PSGI, I often get some push-back from people claiming that PSGI makes things far too complicated. I don’t believe that’s true. But I think I know why they say it. I…

  • The Joy of Prefetch

    If you heard me speak at YAPC or you’ve had any kind of conversation with me over the last few weeks then it’s likely you’ve heard me mention the secret project that I’ve been writing for my wife’s school. To give you a bit of background, there’s one afternoon a week where the students at…

  • Driving a Business with Perl

    Driving a Business with Perl

    I’ve been a freelance programmer for over twenty years. One really important part of the job is getting paid for the work I do. Back in 1995 when I started out there wasn’t all of the accounting software available that you get now and (if I recall correctly) the little that was available was all…