2014.01.10 in #129DateTime::Moonpig, a saner interface to DateTime
Some epic projects also bring fortuitous collateral goodies. The space race gave us disposable diapers, Moonpig, and a more rational interface to the powerful DateTime module. Mark J Dominus makes the case for it.
2014.02.08 in #134Everything needs an ID
Why? Because it's usually simple to do, and makes things easy. Mark Dominus makes the case for the ever-useful unique identifier.
2014.04.26 in #144My brush with Oulipo
Mark Jason Dominus reminisces about his brush with Oulipo, a society of writers that takes delight in "constrained writing", which is not totally unlike code golfing with natural languages.
2015.03.21 in #192A public service announcement about contracts
Some excellent advice from Mark, about the right response when someone asks you to sign a contract with a clause that's only there because the lawyers wanted it. He followed it up with some examples.
2015.08.04 in #211The list monad in Perl and Python
Mark wrote a Perl version of a previous Haskell program using a list monad to solve a cryptarithm puzzle. In writing this I decided I should find out what a monad is. I found various pages declaring themselves to be simple explanations of monads, but I'm not sharing the links here, because I still don't understand monads :-)
2015.11.08 in #224Historical how and why of hash tables
A 35 min presentation by MJD together with the slides explaining what are hash tables (dictionaries for Python programmers), how they really work, and why do we have them.
2017.03.05 in #293Solving twenty-four puzzles
Back in July of last year, Mark blogged about a type of puzzle that his kids were having fun with. Here he talks through the design of his solution, and links to his Perl code.
