Results tagged “links” from Appleseed Blog

My last post contained Perl source code that adhered to the rules of iambic pentameter. An inverse bit of hackery may be seen in these Perlish poetry generators by Nick Montfort. Both programs are 256 bytes in size.

Sample output from the second one:

the sits

chit
of skin spits a kit
skit twins ban
a twin & bill
kin skins kill
fill
a spill chits a pit
shill
sill twills twill
skit

Ajaxload is a nifty do-one-thing-well web-based service. Poke in a few parameters, and out pops a little animated spinner graphic. It's optimized against the background color of your choice, and free for you to download and use however you wish.

In web applications, you most often see these graphics used wherever there's AJAX. Their sudden appearance and rolling motion help reassure users that something is happening, and they should stand by and await further results. They often look something like this: . (That, in fact, is one I just created with Ajaxload for use with Planbeast, a new side project of mine.)

I somehow failed to find this site when searching on likely keywords via Google, earlier this afternoon; I found it instead by its being linked to from some Scriptaculous documentation. Many thanks to Catherine Roman for this simple and useful service.

My friend and colleague Andy Turner just posted some interesting graphs that measure changes in the CPAN's activity rates over the last decade or so. (CPAN being Perl's distributed, internet-based archive of code libraries and other stuff, and approximately 51 percent of what makes Perl my favorite programming language.)

I'm interested to see that the number of new users started to drop off a few years ago, but the activity of existing users has been increasing so much that the archive's overall activity continues to trend upwards.

If I had to guess a single reason for this, it'd involve the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username (as that's a limitation of the system). I think, for example, of DBIx::Class's recent ascendency, and clear community dominance, over the thousand SQL-abstraction modules that came before it. So you have fewer instances of people creating new CPAN author accounts just to upload their own wheel-reinventions.

I recently had a phone conversation with a recruiter who, after we established that I wasn't interested in a permanent position anywhere, confessed to me that she was having a great deal of frustration trying to find people with my skillset and level of experience who were looking for a new career.

To her - and to y'all - I say: Visit jobs.perl.org, and consider posting a want-ad there. In the few years the site's been up, it's quickly become the center of job-posting in the world of Perl expertise. Almost every client I've worked with independently or via Appleseed I met after they posted a job description on that site.

A List Apart, an online magazine about web design (in both the graphical and application-interface sense), has posted a new survey for web professionals, in an effort to construct a snapshot of the state of this young but enormous industry. Anyone who falls under the statement "I make websites" is invited to participate, anywhere in the world.

They did this last year, too, and this is an improved version of the survey based on what they learned as a result. I hadn't heard of that first attempt, but apparently its results impressed plenty of folks, as I've run into several pointers towards this followup effort. (And now you have another one.) I am definitely looking forward to seeing the results.

A bit of behind-the-scenes for you: when I first went independent last year, I gave myself the title "web architect", but wise friends advised me to drop that for being a phrase rather meaningless to anyone outside the profession - and, indeed, when I used it at local business conferences, I found myself having to explaining what it meant to nearly everyone I handed my card to. So I took on "software consultant" as a mantle, and have been trying hard to live up to that since. You can imagine, then, my surprise at discovering that "consultant" wasn't an option, but "architect" was, in this survey's multiple-choice list of job titles! "Other" it is, for me.