mcmillen

Hi! I'm the author of the Perl paint-splatter paper.

"That lady" is Adrienne Porter Felt, who started as an engineer working on Google Chrome security a decade or so ago, and is now a Director of Engineering who manages a sizable chunk of the Chrome team.

I never worked with her directly, but she has a reputation as a good manager and I'm pretty sure she knows how programmers work.

I'm one of the three original co-authors. It was written in early October 2011, just a few days before it was first posted on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099979

I'm glad it's stood the test of ~8 years time so far.

If you've been running a 1997-era Perl app unmodified --including the operating system of the machine it's running on, and security patches to Perl in the mean time -- you are so owned and I really hope you're not storing any important data on that box.

I'm not saying that App Engine is a panacea, but regardless of how you write your code and what technologies you use, there'll be some sort of mandatory maintenance and system administration that you have to do every so often.