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

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 […]

Subroutines and Ampersands

I’ve had this discussion several times recently, so I thought it was worth writing a blog post so that I have somewhere to point people the next time it comes up. Using ampersands on subroutine calls (&my_sub or &my_sub(…)) is never necessary and can have potentially surprising side-effects. It should, therefore, never be used and […]

Modern Perl Articles

Back in 2011 I wrote a series of three articles about “Modern Perl” for Linux Format. Although I mentioned all three articles here as they were published, I didn’t post the actual contents of the articles as I wasn’t sure about the copyright situation. But now I suspect that enough time has passed that copyright […]