tinita

We are happy to announce that AffinityLive is sponsoring the Perl QA Hackathon 2015.

What language do you use? Whether I'm talking to investors, prospective hires or just curious clients, many people are surprised to hear AffinityLive is written in Perl. Part of the reason was luck - I started hacking away on what would later become AffinityLive over a decade ago. As someone who went to university before Java became the lingua franca of colleges trying to shape job-ready graduates, I cut my teeth more on C++ and found the unshackled freedom of Perl and its incredible list of Internet-friendly modules incredibly appealing.

With AffinityLive, we decided to start at the end of Zawinski's Law: from the beginning, our product has been as much around parsing and making sense of email conversations as it has been about delivering people a browser (and now mobile app) based way to work together. This need to operate at the server level with heavy parsing and extraction loads, combined with our extensive integrations, has made Perl an impressive choice for building an application that often feels like magic for new users.

The other upside of choosing Perl is that while colleges keep turning out Java developers, the talented ones are able to learn a new language as storied and flexible as Perl really quickly; as Paul Graham, the legendary founder of Y-Combinator has found, using an unfashionable language acts as a pretty amazing filter. With more of our stack moving client-side (mobile devices and AngularJS in the browser) we also find Perl to be a great complement for these languages - still knowing and using a great uncle language every day makes for better and more flexible approaches to problem solving than just being a slave to solutions limited to the client side.

As a company, we are proud to be able to lend our support to the Hackathon held April 16-19 in Berlin - massive thanks to all of the members of the Perl community who are participating. We're looking forward to being able to make our own contributions to the future as our engineering team continuously continues to grow and develop - we've made a start and are looking forward to being able to contribute more as AffinityLive grows beyond its bootstrapping roots of survival and into an accomplished and well resourced technology company out of our two homes in San Francisco and Wollongong, Australia.