David Marshall's Perl Portfolio

This page is a brief survey of various Perl scripts and modules that I have written over the years. It is usually the case that they feature coding styles that I have since modified, but they give a general overview of my development.

enews.com

Notes:

1. For whatever reason, it was the convention at enews.com to use 132 columns rather than 80, so these files are very wide.
2. All code in this section is the property of enews.com and is presented here solely for the purpose of illustrating my coding experience. Don't be a bad person by stealing it.

My perl-fu got a lot stronger after I found myself in the enews.com Perl crucible. The code base when I arrived was very fragile and not particularly maintainable. For instance, the similar tasks of loading orders from various strategic partners was performed in separately maintained modules that had commonality decreasing over time.

My primary maintenance activity was a continuing effort to move specific application processing into more general library modules.

• Utilities::ChildProcess - dozens of scripts were opening their own pipes and instituting various levels of process control. This module was the result of many experiments in opening pipes to defective processes.
• Utilities::Data - one of my favorite modules to keep tweaking, this contains some of the basic list manipulations that everyone implements. It duplicates some of the processing that DBI performs, but we weren't using DBI.
• Utilities::Database::Predicate - the solution for simplifying some very complicated WHERE clauses.
• InstanceData - nearly every legacy script was doing its own thing in determining its name, when it started, etc. This module centralized such processing.
• SingleInstance - even more annoyingly, several scripts were trying to ensure that only one instance of the script could run at once. This module incorporated a common technique for preventing duplicate instances.
• GenericLoader and StandardLoader - as mentioned above, every partner's orders were being loaded using a completely separate module. GenericLoader and StandardLoader were the products of a lot of thought into creating a set of classes to do the loading so that each partner's module would include only necessary information. New partners' modules were once scoped at about three weeks for implementation and testing; these modules reduced that time to about thirty minutes needed to create a customized loader for a new partner.
• GenericLoaderUtilities - an excerpt from a big collection of utility functions. The only one of which I am proud/ashamed is the awful majesty that is luhn_sum.
• MIMEMerger.pl - a general purpose script that was used to send out our affiliate newsletter.
• TLogLookup.pl - the last script I wrote before the end. It's the culmination of my sick affinity for "use constant," but it has a nice big closure that I like.
• mongocheck - a quick script I wrote one day when I grew tired of the habit of another person to check in broken code on a regular basis. This script checks out a copy of the code for a particular tag and verifies that everything compiles.

Personal

Here are a few scripts that I have written more recently.

• HTML::Element::MetaHash - a module that I will be getting ready to submit to CPAN Real Soon Now. It ties the <META> tags in an HTML::Tree to a hash.
• add-virtual-host - a silly script that I wrote to save me keystrokes when adding virtual hosts to my httpd.conf.
• ParadisePoker::Tournament - a module that I wrote for some friends to extract and report on poker tournament summaries.
• ParadisePoker::Tournament::Database - a module to insert extracted information to a database.