A wild Perl.Kiwi appears...

Kiaora dear reader,

welcome to this site all about the wonderful world of software development with the Perl programming language. My name is Lance, a New Zealander (hence the .kiwi domain) who writes computer software in the amazing language that is Perl.

In my day job I am a Software Development Manager for a large (20+ million users) recruitment website; there we use a variety of languages and technologies including Perl and C#. But this site is not about work, rather about the fun and power of the Perl programming language.

Perl is one of the most mature and well supported languages in the world today (2021), it's been used in production for decades and it powered the first wave of the world wide web. It's used as "glue code" a lot; and is powerful, fast, flexible and expressive.

After the first internet bubble bursting; Perl lost some of it's "cool". That said it's never gone away and continues to grow and evolve whilst powering productions systems day in and day out.

It's maturity means it has a vast array of third party libraries; virtually all free and open source. These libraries are generally heavily tested across a multitude of language versions, operating systems and hardware platforms.

Despite Perl's fall from fame; it remains a great language to use and this site is here to share my passion for this language and the things it allows me to do.As someone not currently coding day to day (I'm a manager for my sins), this site is where I shall be sharing my personal recreational coding in Perl (and some other languages).

As I write this initial post I have a few projects on the go. The main one being a old project from approximate 2003 that I picked up the code base again over the Christmas break and did the refurbishment work to get this old .CGI based app running again. I will share some posts on that process as saving and improving a legacy code base is an activity I don't often see written about; yet we all end up doing it.

More recently I have taken that base code and moved it into a more modern MVC style web framework turning it into a psgi application. This has some interesting things to cover as well. There is a different skill set and mindset between working on a legacy code base and creating a new application.

In 2020, I spent some time participating in the Perl Weekly Challenge; a Perl community initiative where you solve a coding challenge each week. I live-streamed some of those and will share here too. And I hope to live stream and share more of me doing these code kata style challenges.

So... the plan for this website is to separate out my Perl and coding passion from the rest of me and share it here. This means if you follow the RSS or the @PerlKiwi twitter feed it will just be coding and mostly Perl. All my other "stuff" will be elsewhere, trust me; it's a good thing. My Judo obsession will bleed over to here I am sure, but primarily this is going to be about Perl.

I hope if you are reading this that you are ready to share some of my experiences "pottering around in Perl". This site is mainly for myself to type up my Perl learning's and experiences as an archive of the fun and enjoyment it brings me. I do hope that some of what I write will serve a future Perl developer who googles for just the right thing and finds one of these pages has some practical experience of a challenge they are facing and helps them see how I tackled it.

Kia Manawanui!

Lance