One of the greatest strengths of the Perl ecosystem is Plack. It provides a super-flexible interface between web servers and Perl web applications. Because of its middleware architecture, it is incredibly easy to compose complex behaviors by snapping together small, focused modules. Recently, I wanted to create a...

This guide explains how I install a clean version of Perl from source on macOS, along with the modules that I use every day. My philosophy for programming tools is to try to keep things as simple and transparent as possible. I often find that modern package and version managers, while powerful, add layers of...

There are many ways to install Node.js on MacOS, such as nvm or homebrew, but I’ve always preferred a direct, manual approach. For me, this method gives you complete control, involves no extra package managers, and makes upgrades transparent and simple. This guide will walk you through manually installing Node.js on...

A while back, I decided it was time to finally learn how to touch-type. I was never a slow typer, but my hands constantly roamed the keyboard instead of staying in the home position. Inspired by Steve Yegge to do better, I settled on using GNU Typist (the command is gtypist) as my practice partner. GNU Typist is run...

Every time I set up a new Mac, I follow a specific process to install my command-line programming tools. My goal is simple: create a development environment that closely mirrors the RHEL web servers I work with daily. This guide outlines that process. This guide outlines how to install three prerequisites to working...

It’s been on my list for some time to finally start using Neovim and all that it has to offer as an IDE. As an experienced Vim user, it was hard deciding on what path I should take to convert over. Almost by definition, Vi users are all distinct snowflakes and have their preferred tools and methodologies. That makes...

The GitHub CI Actions for my favorite open-source project, the bookmarking service Shaarli, started failing recently. No one was quite sure why, especially because there hadn’t been any significant updates to the tests, and they passed locally for all the developers who ran them. I had a small pull request that was...

I was fortunate enough to attend my very first in-person Perl conference this year in Las Vegas! Ironically my first real exposure to Perl was almost 30 years (!!) ago when I read Learning Perl on a plane to Vegas! It was great to finally meet so many wonderful people that I felt I already knew through using their...

Episode 294 of JS Party is titled Reports of Node’s death are greatly exaggerated and features two members of the Node Technical Steering Committee: Matteo Collina and James Snell. Their perspective on the project (and software development in general) was insightful, especially some of the challenges they face....

Converting my relatively basic personal website to Eleventy has shown me how challenging it is to build a static-site generator flexible enough to satisfy all the user cases and requirements. The great thing about Eleventy is being simultaneously opinionated by default and yet extremely flexible and customizable....