Saturday 16 April 2016

Interview - Perl’s Pumpking Ricardo Signes

Perl’s pumpking is the person who manages the core Perl 5 language. Having worn that mantle for almost five years, Ricardo Signes (rjbs) has set the next major release to mark the end of his reign. Over this period Perl has moved forward in leaps and bounds in terms of features, stability and popularity. I’ve taken Signes’ reflective mood as an opportunity to understand the person and processes behind Perl’s golden age.





Sunday 6 March 2016

The Perl flip-flop operator

Have you ever wondered where fashion and software development overlap? If so, look no further than the flip-flop. It's a feature available in Sed, Awk, Ruby and Perl which - akin to its namesake - is short, revealing and can raise a few eyebrows.
Robot Gear flip-flops by Cafepress

Sunday 31 January 2016

How To Grow a Development Team

For the manager of a technology shop, "Hotel California" has the ideal spin on staffing. As the Eagles so bluntly put it "You can check-out any time you like/But you can never leave!". In modern business speak - Hotel California has zero "churn", where churn is the portion of recruits each year who are hired to replace employees who've left.



No Churn


Wednesday 20 January 2016

Quick and Dirty: Vim highlighting and tag matching for HTML and Perl's Template Toolkit

If you're a Vim connoisseur you're probably using vim-perl for getting all the Perl goodies you can cram into Vim. On the other hand if, like me, you're building and trashing virtual machines left, right and centre to develop different widgets you don't have the patience to achieve a perfect Vim environment on each box. This is the quick and dirty solution which gets you 80% of the solution in a matter of seconds.