Dave's Stuff

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 that there’s a CPAN module for dealing with GEDCOM files and a mailing list for the discussion of the…

Last July I wrote a post threatening to cull some of my unused CPAN modules. Some people made sensible comments and I never got round to removing the modules (and I’m no longer planning to) but I marked the modules in question as “HANDOFF” and waited for the rush of volunteers. As predicted in my previous post, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the interest, but this week I got an email from Chase Whitener…

During the second week of February, I ran my (approximately) annual public Perl training courses in association with FlossUK. Things were organised slightly differently this year. Previously we’ve run two two-day “general purpose” courses – one on Intermediate Perl and one on Advanced Perl. This year we ran four courses, each of which were on a more specific technology. There were one-day courses…

A couple of months ago I mentioned some public training courses that I’ll running in London next month. The courses are being organised by FlossUK and since the courses have been announced the FlossUK crew have been running a marketing campaign to ensure that as many people as possible know about the courses. As part of that campaign they’ve run some sponsored tweets, so information about the…

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 think they say it because most of the time when we say “you should really port that…

London Perl Workshop Review

(Photo by Mark Keating) Last Saturday was the annual London Perl Workshop. And, as always, it was a great opportunity to soak up the generosity, good humour and all-round-awesomeness of the European Perl community. I say “European” as the LPW doesn’t just get visitors from London or the UK. There are many people who attend regularly from all over Europe. And, actually, from further afield – there…

The Long Death of CGI.pm

CGI.pm has been removed from the core Perl distribution. From 5.22, it is no longer included in a standard Perl installation. There are good technical reasons for this. CGI is a dying technology. In 2015, there are far better ways to write web applications in Perl. We don’t want to be seen to encourage the use of a technology which no-one should be using. This does lead to a small problem for us…

A more detailed write-up of the LPW will follow in the next few days. But in the meantime, here are the slides to the three talks I gave. http://www.slideshare.net/davorg/modern-web-development-with-perl http://www.slideshare.net/davorg/improving-dev-assistant    

London Perl Workshop 2015

This time next week we will all be enjoying the London Perl Workshop. I thought it was worth looking at what the day has in store. As always (well, except that one time when they had no power) the LPW will take place at the Cavendish Campus of the University of Westminster. I’m told there are exams or something like that taking place on the same day, so it’s important to follow the signs when you…

Training Courses – More Details

Last week I mentioned the public training courses that I’ll be running in London next February. A couple of people got in touch and asked if I had more details of the contents of the courses. That makes sense of course, I don’t expect people to pay £300 for a days training without knowing a bit about the syllabus. So here are details of the first two courses (the Moose one and the DBIx::Class…

Public Training in London – February 2016

For several years I’ve been running an annual set of public training courses in London in conjunction with FLOSS UK (formerly known as UKUUG). For various scheduling reasons, we didn’t get round to running any this year, but we have already made plans for next year. I’ll be running five days of training in central London from 8th – 12th February. The courses will take place at the Ambassador’s…

Build RPMs of CPAN Modules

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably already know that I have an interest in building RPMs of CPAN modules. I run a small RPM repository where I make available all of the RPMs that I have build for myself. These will either be modules that aren’t available in other RPM repositories or modules where I wanted a newer version than the currently available one. I’m happy to take…

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 a grass-roots conference. It’s specifically planned so that it will be relatively cheap for attendees.…

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 asked me to go ahead and write it. It turned out to be harder that I thought it would be. I expected…

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 pretty expensive stuff. At some point I thought to myself “I don’t need to buy one of these expensive…