Well, YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC is over, and I had the opportunity (after getting bumped around more than a couple times) to give a lightning talk as part of the final session. I had previously done a blog post on the subject, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts with a wider audience.
My YAPC::NA 2011 lightning talk
Human usability testers wanted
When I wrote 1App::perlhl1 a few weeks ago, I was mostly concerned with getting it working. I picked colours more-or-less at random, and I noted that I planned to tweak them to achieve better readability. I’d like to do some hallway usability testing – if you’re interested, please try cloning my git repository and playing with the branches. master has one colour scheme, and I created colour-2 and colour-3 to test two more schemes.
The death of tribal knowledge
Michael Schwern talks about Perl5’s shortcomings, and explains how perl5i can overcome many of them – it is a pragma to fix as much of Perl 5 as possible all at once. While I haven’t worked with perl5i much, I wanted to talk about something Schwern talked about that resonated with me, and that’s the concept of “tribal knowledge.”
CLI Perl syntax highlighter
Last night, someone posed a problem in #perl-help. They wanted to have syntax highlighting in their shell for Perl code. I immediately suggested that they use Pygments – I knew about it because I’d used it before, and I had experimented with the command line tool. But I was surprised there wasn’t already a Perl solution.
A Perl yardstick
chromatic identified some reasons why it is difficult to hire great Perl programmers, and then followed it up with some advice for hiring managers. They suggest a series of questions every good Perl programmer should be able to answer. I wanted to know how I stacked up.
OMG, is that WordPress?!
I’m a Perl guy. I like the language a lot – how it looks, how it works… Even if it isn’t perfect, I like it a lot. But I also love things that work, and Wordpress works.