Now this is an idea that I wish more companies would get behind.

Nestoria is a property search engine based in London, but covering several countries (I use them here in France). They're really slick, growing nicely, and their back end is mostly written in Perl. A couple of day's ago they wrote on their blog that Test::More is their module of the month.

Why is this cool? Because this is going to be a regular feature and they're going to start donating a $1 a week (via gittip) to the author or a prime contributor of whatever project they've selected. I would love to see companies financially backing open source products they benefit from. I see plenty of companies are signing up for gittip for this very purpose.

To Nestoria: many kudos for finding yet another way to give back (they also sponsor Perl events and release open source code).

To everyone else: go sign up for your gittip account if you haven't already.

And ask your company to think about gittip and maybe giving back to those who've helped them. I suspect many companies wouldn't find $1 a week to be a burden, though they can certainly pay more if they wish.

After viewing an interesting post in Reddit about programming in color (syntax highlighting that focuses on data flow instead of syntax), I saw that one user had developed a very similar feature for PHP. The idea is to highlight the variable that your cursor is currently on. I liked what he wrote, so I modified it for Perl.

Are you a lone Web developer who has a great idea for an app but you're intimidated by the idea of getting a Web server, maintaining the OS, installing the database, handling DNS, keeping up to date with security patches and so on? Instead, you can try a Platform as a Service (PaaS) system and let them handle the system administration stuff while you focus on just writing your code.

I wrote a short guide on how to write Perl applications for Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS cloud service. It turns out that it's really, really easy. And the basic service is free!