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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
