Ravenhall

Hi. I'm Nathan. I go by Ravenhall on Perl Monks/PAUSE for those of you in the Perl world. I'm starting this blog to record my work revolutionizing things here at FedEx.

As far as I know, I'm the only full-time Perl programmer here. Perl is used heavily in my group - for both system automation and administration, as well as a few simple web applications. Most of this code is functional in nature, and was written between 12-5 years ago. It's also spread across many servers, and is not very maintainable or portable. It was written under Perl 5.4 - 5.8, so there's lots of room to improve things and bring them up to date.

I've got relative autonomy in choosing the direction things will go in the future. This, is a Good Thing, as Perl gives me a lot of choices to make this codebase more modular, maintainable, powerful, and easy to use. This will let me get more done with less, and I'll be able to write modern web apps and administration tools that will expand my group's capabilities.

We'll be staying with Perl 5 - 5.14 is our target. We'll also be moving forward as Perl evolves, so my goal is to stay with the latest stable. I hope to eventually make the jump to Perl 6, but we have a lot of code that needs to be brought up to speed first.

I'm choosing Moose as my object system. Moose is really revolutionizing Perl, and I've really enjoying learning and using it on my own. I'm bringing its power and versatility into this project so that I can take us from a functional 'scripting' methodology into a more capable framework.

I'm looking forward to posting more as I continue working, but I want my posts to be useful, and don't intend this blog to become a diary. So my posts will mainly focus on different aspects of the technologies I'm employing and challenges I encounter while using them.

Enjoy the ride!