oalders

I'm quite happy with NetNewsWire.

No worries. :) I did struggle a little with how to make it obvious that the machine output was not my own. I set it off inside horizontal rules and I did add some prose before and after to say when Claude's output began and ended. If anyone just jumps around using the table of contents, they'll miss that, though. (Not saying that was the case for you).

I had considered putting the research into a gist, but I don't want to have to rely on a 3rd party to keep something that's integral to my post online. Seemed more cohesive to keep it all in one place.

What I was trying to get across was that I had some basis for the points I was trying to make and wasn't just handwaving about it, but I also didn't want to spend endless hours whittling it down. We're all busy people and I see now that it's entirely possible to skim the post and assume it's some low effort word salad. It may be a word salad, but it wasn't low effort. ;)

Author here. Thanks for this context. I do hope this leads to more rigorous attention to the Changelog moving forward.

>Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude

The prose was written by me, with the research being done by Claude and also clearly attributed. I left Claude's research as a series of bullet points so that it would be clear that I'm not passing off an LLM's work as my own, but if anyone wants to dig deeper, they have some starting points to consider.

I don't publish prose written by an LLM for the same reason I would not have an LLM solve a crossword puzzle for me -- there's no joy in that.

On day 20 of The Perl Advent Calendar Michael Schröder, Tina Müller and Oliver Kurz present how SUSE uses Perl for openQA and the Open Build Service.

On day 19 of The Perl Advent Calendar Philippe Bruhat introduces The Underbar, a podcast recording conversations and stories from the Perl community to preserve its history.

On day 14 of The Perl Advent Calendar Chris Prather continues yesterday's story, revealing how Santa's team used Critical Chain project management alongside No Estimates to identify dependencies and ship NaughtyNice 3.0 on schedule.

https://perladvent.org/2025/2025-12-14.html

On day 13 of The Perl Advent Calendar Chris Prather tells how Santa's workshop rebuilt their NaughtyNice system in 24 days using "No Estimates"—breaking work into daily slices and measuring throughput instead of guessing timelines.

On day 12 of The Perl Advent Calendar Sawyer X shows us how Melian, a high-speed in-memory caching server, reduces database query times from milliseconds to microseconds by loading tables into memory.

https://perladvent.org/2025/2025-12-12.html

On day 11 of The Perl Advent Calendar D Ruth Holloway demonstrates how to generate Mondrian-style abstract art paintings using Perl with Moo, Imager, and SVG modules.

On day 2 of the 2025 Perl Advent Calendar, Dave Cross walks us through how Pixie the Elf uses App::BlurFill to change the aspect ratio of an image.

https://perladvent.org/2025/2025-12-02.html

This is year 26 of The Perl Advent Calendar. \o/

Thank you for sharing this. I am always looking for more sponsors. I'm also happy just to make new connections.

:) Working on the fundraising has been a fun and challenging project. Perl is still quite useful and it's often somewhere in the stack, even if organizations don't openly talk about it. Finding these orgs is part of the fun.

This is 100% correct. My current strategy is to locate 10-15 sponsors at 10k per year so that we can secure the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Donors can, of course, always commit to more.

I can be reached via olaf@perlfoundation.org and also at https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafalders/

For anyone who may have a contact, I'm quite happy to be CCed on introductory emails or I can send you a message that you can forward on to decision makers, if you feel that's a lower pressure scenario. Both of these approaches have worked out for us. There is more than one way to do it.

Fundraising is hard. There's a longer history around it that I don't have the space to fully explore here, but the quick version is that I'm currently looking for more sponsors in this 10k range rather than having to rely on 100k donations from very large orgs.

Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find more orgs who can/will donate in this range.

So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me: olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.

This seems like a reasonable fact check on dairy tarrifs: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/politics/trump-canada-dairy-t...

The actual podcast site is at https://underbar.cpan.io/ The summary from the site is:

> If there's one thing I like more than writing code, it's talking about code. My best memories about code usually involve a late night discussion with a drink in one hand and no keyboard in the other.

> In 2024, I seriously started listening to podcasts. "Live conversation with eventual interventions from the audience" is the format I find to be the closest to the bar conversations I like so much, and I'd love to listen to (and chat with) my friends from the open source community, talking about random mostly technical topics.

> So, I figured I should just try it! How hard can it be to setup a conference call, invite a few interesting people, pick a topic to start the conversation, hit "record", and stop after roughly one hour? And make the recording public afterwards, for others to enjoy.

> (If you don't like the undertones of "bar", you can think of this as "campfire stories".)

Moose is a big hammer. Moo can do a lot of what Moose can do, with very few dependencies.

It would be unusual to be doing new work in CGI, but I was looking at it recently because that was presented as an easy option for writing a cPanel plugin. At the very least, it's good to know that security fixes will still be applied to CGI.pm if they're needed.

I found myself working on a CGI script just last week. Last year I was asked to patch a production CMS that was just a giant collection of CGI scripts.

This stuff is still out there and when it's done well, it "just works". I'm not saying CGI is the future, but I did find it refreshing to edit a script and then have the change immediately available without waiting for some daemon to restart/reload.

This is exactly right. We can't use a camel on a book about Perl, but we can use our own version of a camel otherwise. However, there are a number of camels floating around and it would be great if we could all standardize on the same thing. This is an attempt to do that. We will see how it works out.

The good news is that there is some LSP support now. I recommend PerlNavigator if this is something that interests you: https://github.com/bscan/PerlNavigator

The Mojolicious framework can do a lot of heavy lifting for you. It's not that hard to do interesting things while writing minimal code: https://www.mojolicious.org/

We've still got more advent articles coming, including one very special day which is actually a live stream from Randal Schwartz (Learning Perl). He'll share his "version of the story of the Schwartzian Transform". https://lu.ma/giz69577

If you don't mind sharing this info, I'd love to hear about it. :) I'm olaf@perlfoundation.org

Also, we did document how we arrive at the number: https://www.olafalders.com/2021/06/30/cpan-bus-factor/

https://github.com/houseabsolute/ubi does a nice job of fetching binaries from GitHub. Just give it a repo and a location to place the binary.

ubi --project oalders/is --in ~/local/bin

I went to high school in Ontario around this time but I never saw these machines. Our computer lab was a bunch of networked Commodore 64s that we used for learning Waterloo Structured BASIC.

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