With every year that passed, as Perl 6 produced more press releases than actual code, the attractiveness of Perl as a platform declined. Sure, it still had users. Sure, it still had people starting new projects. (The Modern Perl movement was a decent attempt to bring wider enthusiasm back into the ecosystem by dispelling some of the worst myths of the language. It modeled itself after JavaScript: The Good Parts without realizing that Perl lacked JavaScript's insurmountable advantage of ubiquity. Who could have predicted that Objective-C would be interesting again a year before the iPhone came out?)

What it didn't have was a clearly defined future, let alone an articulated one.

We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away.

URLs have a purpose. We are very cavalier about that purpose. We don’t use canonicals. We’re sloppy about switching back and forth between HTTP and HTTPs. We don’t bother to logically structure our URLs. We rebuild websites and let all the links break. We don’t appreciate that crawlers are dumb and they need more context than humans.

The author goes on to complain about the misuse of HTTP methods and status codes as if he had never heard of REST APIs. Overall, though, he makes some good points.

Microservices one of these ideas that are nice in practice, but all manner of complexity comes out when it meets reality. For this reason, I wanted to write this article to capture some of these and redress the balance.

The desire to solve every possible problem that might come up in some context leads to failure. Solve the problem at hand, nothing more. Start with the application at hand. Everything that's not needed to implement that application, down to the function-argument level, has to go. Sure, write the code so that you can extend it later, but don't put those extensions into it right off the bat.

Here’s part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture.

Strider is an Open Source Continuous Integration and Deployment platform. It is written in JavaScript/Node.JS and uses MongoDB. It is released under the BSD license. While similar conceptually to systems such as Travis and Jenkins, Strider is designed to be easy to setup, use, and customize.

Python, on the other hand, has problems of its own. The biggest is that it has dozens of web application frameworks, but none of them are any good. Pythonists are well aware of the first part but apparently not of the second, since when I tell them that I’m using my own library, the universal response is “I don’t think Python needs another web application framework”. Yes, Python needs fewer web application frameworks. But it also needs one that doesn’t suck.

I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles.

Detect the language of text.

Most modern processors are multi-core, yet Perl programs will typically run single-threaded on only one core at a time. Enter the Many Core Engine module - it makes it easy to run your existing Perl code in parallel across every core on your platform, and get a huge speed boost along the way.