Perl

Engineering or development says, OK, we need a software build and just It gets executed and then everybody's happy.

The automation side, you know, the automation from say 10 years ago, depending on your company, might be something that somebody can run with a script like Perl or Bash or something like that.

But it may fail, you know, may fail 20% of the time and it has to be manually run.

And when the results come in, they need to be manually triaged by somebody.

I got moved into the DSL division as DSL was coming to be and learned a lot there.

I learned an important lesson about... failing at scale when I made a Perl expect script that was supposed to go update the usernames and passwords on a lot of DSL.

So DSL was, you know, and Scott, you're familiar with DSL.

I think you worked with it a little bit.

And when I came on board... we ended up building our own router OS, basically, which sounds a lot more grandiose than it is.

We basically had a bunch of Perl scripts that ran on a Linux box when it booted up and installed a bunch of IP tables, like static routes and NAT rules that kind of created the route routing infrastructure for that ISP.

So I kind of started building networking with software, but also in that process.

So I did learn a lot of like that.

But I learned kind of like basic Linux administration skills.

I learned basic coding skills, especially like version control and how to work on code bases with other people and all that stuff.

But I definitely also knew that like writing Perl was not my passion.

Right.

And when I came on board... we ended up building our own router OS, basically, which sounds a lot more grandiose than it is.

We basically had a bunch of Perl scripts that ran on a Linux box when it booted up and installed a bunch of IP tables, like static routes and NAT rules that kind of created the route routing infrastructure for that ISP.

So I kind of started building networking with software, but also in that process.

So I did learn a lot of like that.

But I learned kind of like basic Linux administration skills.

I learned basic coding skills, especially like version control and how to work on code bases with other people and all that stuff.

But I definitely also knew that like writing Perl was not my passion.

Right.

And when I came on board... we ended up building our own router OS, basically, which sounds a lot more grandiose than it is.

We basically had a bunch of Perl scripts that ran on a Linux box when it booted up and installed a bunch of IP tables, like static routes and NAT rules that kind of created the route routing infrastructure for that ISP.

So I kind of started building networking with software, but also in that process.

So I did learn a lot of like that.

But I learned kind of like basic Linux administration skills.

I learned basic coding skills, especially like version control and how to work on code bases with other people and all that stuff.

But I definitely also knew that like writing Perl was not my passion.

Right.

Maybe they asked, "Hey, we gotta change it." And they're like, "Uh, uh, boss, we don't know how.

It's all in, it's all in, uh, it's in, it's in Perl.

We writ, uh, wrote it all in Perl.

We don't know how to even touch it."

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... like Perl, you know, Apache servers, kind of all that was taking off.

Um-

It, it, it's roughly in the si- same time period.

I did a lot of that, and then most of it in those early years were Java, like, based on the, uh, on the back end.

Yeah.

And then on the front end, occasionally you get like a Perl-based LAMP stack site here and there thrown in, but most of it was Java, at least in my experience.

And then on the front end, right, it was just this pure chaos because it was going through the Web 2.0 revolution, right, where they were adding JavaScript into everything.