After more than six months, and more than a few technical hurdles, NYTProf v3 has been released at last.
In this post I’ll review the major changes and significant new features. (more…)
December 24, 2009
October 5, 2009
Wishlist of PL/Perl Enhancements for PostgreSQL 8.5
I’m working with PostgreSQL for my day job, and liking it.
We’re fairly heavy users of stored procedures implemented in PL/Perl, with ~10,000 lines in ~100 functions (some of which have bloated to painful proportions). This creates some interesting issues and challenges for us.
There’s a window of opportunity now to make improvements to PL/Perl for PostgreSQL 8.5. I’m planning to work with Andrew Dunstan to agree on a set of changes and develop the patches.
As a first step along that road I want to map out here the changes I’m thinking of and to ask for comments and suggestions.
September 22, 2009
September 10, 2009
Perl in five sentences
I just added a concluding slide to my updated Perl Myths talk. Having comprehensively debunked some myths with hard facts about perl and its ecosystem, I wanted to end with a slide that summarized some truths.
I liked the slide text so much I wanted to share it with you:
Perl:
has a massive library of reusable code
has a culture of best practice and testing
has a happy welcoming growing community
has a great future in Perl 5 and Perl 6
is a great language for getting your job done
for the last 20 years, and the next 20!
It would make more sense after seeing the talk, but I think it stands well on its own as a summary of Perl.
September 4, 2009
Is your Perl community visible?
As I mentioned recently, I’m working on an update to my Perl Myths talk. (Which is really a review of the state of the art, state of the community, resources, and best practices. You could even call it marketing.)
In recent months, and especially while researching for this update, it’s become clear to me that the Perl community is both functioning well and growing more conscious of its own role and value.
But are the various components of “the community” sufficiently visible? (more…)
August 13, 2009
Help me update my Perl Myths talk for 2009
I’m going to be speaking at the OSS BarCamp in Dublin in September. Given the likely audience I think my Perl Myths talk would be a good fit.
It needs updating though, and that’s where you can help… (more…)
August 7, 2009
July 6, 2009
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in Perl
I’m looking for a CRM system implemented in Perl. As it turns out, so are the Perl Foundation.
So I thought I’d summarize my interpretation of the comments on that thread, as much for my own benefit as yours, and see if this post flushes out any further information.
We’ll start with the smaller/personal projects and work up from there…
(more…)
June 15, 2009
Unattributed copying of perl blog content via Planet Perl
I recall other bloggers complaining of unattributed redistribution of their work. Now a site called rapid-dev.net has started redistributing Plant Perl posts, including mine, with an advert at the top.
I wouldn’t mind if the page had clear attribution, but it doesn’t. In fact, at the bottom it says “Author: hoanatwho”.
That doesn’t feel right. Especially as many of my posts, and probably many others from Planet Perl, use the first-person pronoun “I”.
Why does this matter? A couple of months ago Merlin Mann wrote a long but excellent piece that explains why far better than I could.
Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And — if and when I choose to give away the things that I make — nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.
Merlin discusses, with his typical style, the motivations of those who make their work available for free, and the perils of presuming to understand their motives. Although written mostly about bloggers it seems very applicable to authors of Open Source software. For me it echoes how I feel about coding and, to an extent, the freedom that Perl give me to express my thoughts.
If you have a blog I recommend you at least make the licence for reuse clear. My blog has a “Terms of Use” link in the sidebar that refers to Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0″ license.
Looking at the Planet Perl page I see it has no licence. Perhaps that should be fixed — even if only to say that the license of the feeds being aggregated must be respected.
June 5, 2009
Has NYTProf helped you? Tell me how…
At OSCON this year1 I’m giving a “State-of-the-art Profiling with Devel::NYTProf” talk. It’ll be an update of the one I gave last year, including coverage of new features added since then (including, hopefully, two significant new features that are in development).
This year I’d like to spend some time talking about how interpret the raw information and using it to guide code changes. Approaches like common sub-expression elimination and moving invariant code out of loops are straight-forward. They’re ‘low hanging fruit’ with no API changes involved. Good for a first-pass through the code.
Moving loops down into lower-level code is an example of a deeper change I’ve found useful. There are many more. I’d like to collect them to add to the talk and the NYTProf documentation.
So here’s a question for you: after looking at the NYTProf report, how did you identify what you needed to do to fix the problems?
I’m interested in your experiences. How you used NYTProf, how you interpreted the raw information NYTProf presented, and then, critically, how you decided what code changes to make to improve performance. What worked, what didn’t. The practice, not the theory.
Could you to take a moment to think back over the times you’ve used NYTProf, the testing strategy you’ve used, and the code changes you’ve made as a result? Ideally go back and review the diffs and commit comments.
Then send me an email — tell me your story!
The more detail the better! Ideally with actual code (or pseudo-code) snippets2.
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