Watch on YouTube

Awesome things have been happening in Perl recently; so many that even if you’ve been paying close attention, you may have missed a few. In this talk we’ll examine some of the coolest recent technologies for Perl programmers, including:

• Overhauling Perl’s Object Oriented framework with Moose.
• Making everything a first-class object with autobox.
• Slashing your error handling code with autodie.
• Building fast, readable and reusable regular expressions with Perl 5.10.
• Bundling and building stand-alone applications using PAR, the Perl Archiver.
• Astonishingly good profiling with Devel::NYTProf.
• Playing MineSweeper automatically with App::SweeperBot.

Today started with breakfast. A breakfast so good that I decided to tell my friends on Facebook about it. Rather than telling everyone about my breakfast habits, I have a friends list that I use for the purpose. Actually, I have dozens of lists, with people categorised by interests, social circle, location, shared experiences, personality type, programming language, and all manner of other criteria.

Telling my friends about my breakfast shouldn’t have been a big deal, except when I selected my breakfast list, Facebook informed me that posting to lists has changed, and now users will be able to see who else can see a given post. The pop-up cheerfully informed me that they won’t be told the name of the list they’re on, so everything’s okay, right?

Watch on YouTube

Your brain has not evolved for modern life; it’s full of bugs; we get things wrong when predicting the future, estimating our skills, or even understanding why we feel a particular way.

There are oftentimes when I talk enthusiastically about sharing my skills, techniques, and knowledge with other people. Usually this is greeted with enthusiasm in return, but sometimes I get a strange reaction… Whether it’s improving one’s codebase, or creating a spectacular outfit, or simply getting interesting people to meet and share their ideas, I’ll occasionally have a friend ask me if I really want to be doing that, because I’m giving away my “secrets”.

I appreciate that in business, a competitive advantage is a good thing. Being able to differentiate yourself from your competition is vitally important, and sharing one’s secrets with those who might use them to compete with you isn’t always a wise choice.

My problem with this attitude is that it assumes that money is the point of the exercise. It’s easy to think this, and from a business perspective it might be true, but thinking of money as the goal kind of misses the whole point of living.

Watch on YouTube

Technology advances through the creation of new inventions. Devices, protocols, machines, and ideas all increase the breadth of human knowledge, and make life easier for us all… At least in theory.