Every major language has thousands of libraries which enable programmers to reach higher, further and faster than before. Package managers (the online systems for sharing code) are key to a language's success; Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Node.js all have strong offerings. But which one is the best and what can we learn from each of them? This article is the first in a two-part series where I review each package manager. Part one focuses on searching and using packages and part two will look at how easy it is to upload and share packages.

Over the past month at Lyft we’ve been working on porting our infrastructure code away from Puppet. We had some difficulty coming to agreement on whether we wanted to use SaltStack (Salt) or Ansible. We were already using Salt for AWS orchestration, but we were divided on whether Salt or Ansible would be better for configuration management. We decided to settle it the thorough way by implementing the port in both Salt and Ansible, comparing them over multiple criteria.

First a definition: A story point is a measure of the effort required to build out a story. It has nothing to do with time. Points usually occur on a 1-to-5 scale (where 1 represents a trivial effort), but some prefer a Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…) because the further you get from trivial, the more the effort ratchets up. I can't emphasize too strongly that this measure has nothing to do with time beyond the broad observation that hard stuff takes longer. There is no way to map a point to a particular time interval.

You just replace use Getopt::Long with use Getopt::Long::Complete and your program suddenly supports tab completion. This works for most/many programs.

In other words, you're estimating something concrete — a fixed set of features. To insist on meeting an estimate at a fixed deadline is to commit to building that set of features. That set is bound to be wrong, however, so the estimate is bound to be meaningless. Committing to the deadline is effectively a commitment to build the wrong product.

I'm not sure about you, but in my "real world," building a product that nobody's going to buy isn't a particularly important goal.

Modern Perl is one way to describe the way the world's most effective Perl programmers work. They use language idioms. They take advantage of the CPAN. They show good taste and craft to write powerful, maintainable, scalable, concise, and effective code. You can learn these skills too!

The definitive source of the best JavaScript libraries, frameworks, and plugins.

App.js is a lightweight JavaScript UI library for creating mobile webapps that behave like native apps, sacrificing neither performance nor polish.

Getting Started will guide you through the process of creating a simple Dropwizard project: Hello World. Along the way, we’ll explain the various underlying libraries and their roles, important concepts in Dropwizard, and suggest some organizational techniques to help you as your project grows. (Or you can just skip to the fun part.)