This month I started a new job at Alert Logic, a cybersecurity provider with Perl (among many other things) at its beating heart. I’ve been learning a lot, and part of the process has been understanding the APIs in the code base. To that end, I’ve been writing small test…

When I first start­ed writ­ing Perl in my ear­ly 20’s, I tend­ed to fol­low a lot of the struc­tured pro­gram­ming con­ven­tions I had learned in school through Pascal, espe­cial­ly the notion that every func­tion has a sin­gle point of exit. For example: sub double_even_number { # not…

This past year of blog­ging has intro­duced me to a wide vari­ety of peo­ple in the Perl com­mu­ni­ty. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their pub­lished work, and even more I’ve ​“met” inter­act­ing on social media and oth­er forums. …

I men­tioned in pass­ing last week that the next major release of Perl, v5.36, is set to enable warnings by default for code that opts in to use v5.35; or above. Commemorating Perl’s 34th birth­day the week before that, I not­ed that the warn­ings sys­tem has been get­ting ever finer-grained…

I remem­ber a brief time in the mid-​2000s insist­ing on so-​called ​“Yoda con­di­tions” in my Perl. I would place con­stants to the left of equal­i­ty com­par­isons. In case I acci­den­tal­ly typed a sin­gle = instead of ==, the com­pil­er would catch it instead of blithe­ly assign­ing a vari­able. E.g.: if…

Friday, December 17, 2021, marked the thirty-fourth birth­day of the Perl pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and coin­ci­den­tal­ly this year saw the release of ver­sion 5.34. There are plen­ty of Perl devel­op­ers out there who haven’t kept up with recent (and not-​so-​recent) improve­ments to the lan­guage and its ecosys­tem, so I thought I…

The Java world had an… inter­est­ing week­end when secu­ri­ty researchers revealed on December 9 a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pop­u­lar Apache Log4j 2 soft­ware library for record­ing and debug­ging events. Systems as diverse as Amazon Web Services, Apple iCloud, and the Minecraft video game could be exploit­ed to run arbi­trary code…

I men­tioned at the Ephemeral Miniconf last month that as soon as I write about one Perl mod­ule (or five), some­one inevitably brings up anoth­er (or sev­en) I’ve missed. And of course, it hap­pened again last week: no soon­er had I writ­ten in pass­ing that I was using Exception::Class than…

Over the past two years, I’ve got­ten back into play­ing Dungeons & Dragons, the famous table­top fan­ta­sy role-playing game. As a soft­ware devel­op­er and musi­cian, one of my favorite char­ac­ter class­es to play is the bard, a mag­i­cal and inspir­ing per­former or word­smith. The list of basic bardic spells includes…