YAPC Europe 2015: A Community is a Home

I’m in Granada, Spain for the 2015 “Yet Another Perl Conference” (YAPC). The three-day conference finished about an hour and a half ago and, rather than going to a bar with dozens of other attendees, I thought I would try to get my impressions down while it’s all still fresh in my mind. YAPC is […]

Beginners Perl Tutorial

A few weeks ago I got an interesting email from someone at Udemy. They were looking for someone to write a beginners Perl tutorial that they would make available for free on their web site. I think I wasn’t the only person that they got in touch with but, after a brief email conversation, they […]

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 […]

Mailing Lists

Over the years I’ve set up a few mailing lists for the discussion of various projects I’ve been involved with. There’s always an expectation that mailing lists will flourish without much input from me. But it never works out like that. The truth is that most mailing lists just quietly die. And, in many cases, […]