I gave my first public talk sometime between the 22nd and 24th September 2000. It was at the first YAPC::Europe which was held in London between those dates. I can’t be any more precise because the schedule is no longer online and memory fades. I can, however, tell you that the talk was a disaster. I originally wasn’t planning to give a talk at all, but my first book was about to be published and the publishers thought that giving a talk about it to a room full of Perl programmers would be great marketing. I guess that makes sense. But what they didn’t take into account was the fact that I kne ..read more

I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time thinking about Amazon links over the last three or four years. It started with the Perl School web site. Obviously, I knew that the book page needed a link to Amazon – so people could buy the books if they wanted to – but that’s complicated by the fact that Amazon has so many different sites and I have no way of knowing which site is local to anyone who visits my web site. I had the same problem when I built a web site for George and the Smart Home. And again when I created a site for Will Sowman’s books. At some point soon, I’ll also want to pu ..read more

I can’t be the only programmer who does this. You’re looking for an online service to fill some need in your life. You look at three or four competing products and they all get close but none of them do everything you want. Or maybe they do tick all the boxes but they cost that little bit more than you’re comfortable paying. After spending a few hours on your search that little voice pops up in your head with that phrase that you really don’t want to hear: Maybe you should just write your own version. How hard can it be? A couple of hours later, you have something that vaguely works, you’ve ..read more

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed – William Gibson The quotation above was used by Tim O’Reilly a lot around the time that Web 2.0 got going. Over recent months, I’ve had a few experiences that have made it clear to me that even the present isn’t particularly evenly distributed either. It’s always easy to find people still using technologies that we would consider archaic (and not in a rustic or hipster way). We’ve known for twenty years that CGI is a bad idea. It’s almost ten years since CGI.pm was removed from Perl core. Surely, all of us are using somethin ..read more

You might remember that I’ve been taking an interest in GitHub Actions for the last year or so (I even wrote a book on the subject). And at the Perl Conference in Toronto last summer I gave a talk called “GitHub Actions for Perl Development” (here are the slides and the video). During that talk, I mentioned a project I was working on to produce a set of reusable workflows that would make it easier for anyone to start using GitHub Actions in their Perl development. Although (as I said in the talk) things were moving pretty quickly on the project at the time, once I got back to London, several o ..read more

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Olaf Alders’ talk, Whither Perl, at the Perl and Raku Conference in Toronto last month. I think it’s well worth spending forty minutes watching it. It triggered a few ideas that I’ll be writing about over the coming weeks and, today, I wanted to start by talking briefly about the idea of GitHub Organisations and introducing a couple of organisations that I’ve recently set up. Olaf talks about GitHub Organisations as a way to ensure the continuity of your projects. And I think that’s a very important point. I’ve written a few times over recent years abou ..read more

It’s been over twenty years since I spoke at a conference in North America. That was at OSCON in San Diego. I’ve actually never spoken at a YAPC, TPC or TPRC in North America. I have the standard European concern about being seen to encourage the USA’s bad behaviour by actually visiting it, so when I saw this year’s TPRC was Canada, I thought that gave me the perfect opportunity to put that right. So I proposed a talk which was accepted. It was also the first time I’d been to any kind of conference since before the pandemic. My last conference was in Riga in 2019. Despite Air Transat’s determi ..read more

[This post might sound like I’m angry at people making it hard to make progress on some things. That’s not the case at all. I realise completely that people have limited time and they get to choose how they spend it. If people are too busy elsewhere or have moved on to other projects then that’s just how it is and we need to deal with that the best we can.] Back in December 2020, I wrote a blog post about how I wanted to fix a long-standing problem with App::HTTPThis. I’m happy to report that two and a half years later, the problem has been fixed. To summarise my previous blog post: App::HTTP ..read more

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I don’t still wear a digital watch, but I do like other things that are almost as unhip. In particular, I pine for the time about twenty years ago when web feeds looked li ..read more

This is a story of one of those nice incidents where something starts off simple, then spirals out of control for a while but, in the end, everyone wins. On Reddit, a few days ago, someone asked ‘Is there a “Planet Perl” with an RSS feed?’ and a few people replied, pointing out the existence of Planet Perl (which is the first Google result for “Planet Perl”). I’m obviously not marketing that site very well as every time I mention it, I get people (pleasantly) surprised that it exists. On this occasion, it was Elvin Aslanov who seemed to discover my site for the first time. And, very soon after ..read more