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Vim Filters: Transforming Java to Perl
April 12 2008
Vim is incredibly powerful, but it has the downside of a steep learning curve. Once that is surmounted, however, it's easy to do a lot of powerful tricks with it. Many of these are things that one sees in full-blown IDEs. My... read moreThe Liskov Substitution Principle
February 07 2008
Uh oh! There's danger! Time for the Wonder Twins to activate their super powers. for twin in wonder_twins() for power in twin.powers() power.activate() ... Fatal Error: Subtype "AnimalMagnetism" cannot be activated in class "SaveTheWorld", line ... Humanity is destroyed because... read moreReading Code Versus Understanding a Language
January 22 2008
One of the common complaints against Perl is that it’s “write-only”. For many Perl programmers, this is regrettably true. Perl, by design, allows you to get things done in a quick and dirty manner. It’s an explicit design goal which allows, amongst other things, the famous “one liners” in Perl… read moreDecember 29 2007
Just before I started my job at the BBC, one of our developers committed code which reduced our test suite run time from an hour and twenty minutes down to twenty-two minutes. One of my first tasks was to improve that. However, improving performance begs the old question of “cpu… read morePerl On Rails - What the BBC Does Right
December 07 2007
Before you dash of a nasty reply, hear me out. There’s an excellent lesson that all companies can learn from this. By now I suspect that many of you have already heard of Perl On Rails, an internal BBC project. Naturally, this made Slashdot, Reddit and Digg, amongst many other sites… read moreOpen Source Relational Databases
October 07 2007
How many open source relational databases can you name? My friend Gabrielle recently sent me the links to two of them. However, if you’re like most technical people, you probably don’t know any — just as I didn’t until recently. I can already imagine many of you saying “bulls**t”, what… read moreSeptember 25 2007
In my career, I’ve been paid to program at ten different companies. Of those companies, only two of them have taken computer related security very seriously and three have had serious security breaches. There is no overlap between these two groups. Of the three security breaches, two of them were known… read moreThe Blue Screen of Felony Convictions
September 06 2007
Recently on this blog, I wrote You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser. In this, I argued that any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I specifically mentioned some breathalyzer software that people were fighting to see the source code of.… read moreInformal Survey: Do Rewrites Really Fail?
August 17 2007
In a now famous article by Joel Spolsky, he argues that you should never rewrite projects from scratch. To be fair, I’ve done this, but generally on open-source projects where I’m donating my time. I’m less worried about financial constraints or competitive advantage. Aside from that edge case, I generally… read morePut Your Business Rules In Your Database
August 13 2007
Maybe you know how to drive a car. Maybe you can fix the carburetor. You probably don’t assume that you know how to design the car. However, programmers who can write huge SQL statements and understand the output of an EXPLAIN statement often assume that they can design a database. Admittedly, unless we’re comparing… read moreYou Have the Right to Read Your Accuser
August 11 2007
A few years ago I was at a meeting where a salesman was trying to pitch his terribly expensive closed-source software to our company. Since security of our data was very important, this topic was raised a few times. I asked about how they encrypted their data. The salesman replied… read moreJune 20 2007
If you read up on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, you might find yourself a bit confused. In fact, I found myself confused by it when I first started reading about it, because there are plenty of resources out there to describe it, but so many of them seem to… read moreMay 08 2007
On this blog, Dave Cross recently wrote about free Perl training the BBC is sponsoring in London (Dave will be the trainer) and chromatic wrote about recruiting Perl programmers and frankly, it’s a hot topic in the Perl community right now. There are, frankly, more jobs than there are programmers.… read moreMay 08 2007
Hey, it’s that time again. If you have an idea that you think would be beneficial for the Perl community, please check out our Call for Proposals. Get paid for open source work! read moreApril 23 2007
Preface: if you love XML, that’s fine. I’ve nothing against the technology per se, but it’s not always the best tool for the job. I’ll be in Copenhagen next weekend for the Nordic Perl Workshop giving a talk about multi-language test suites. This will be based on the work done… read more
