Supporting Open Source Heroes

Accelo, like most successful technology companies today is built on an open source software. Our databases, web servers, mail server, system management and analytics tools are all built on open source software. For Accelo, the glue that runs our back end systems relies in large part on Perl, a language that has a long history, stacks of modules and the ability to operate as comfortably as a web server language as a mail parsing or back-end reporting tool. 

While this choice might seem a little odd in a world of Python hackers and a Facebook based on PHP, our "P" in the LAMP stack has been great for us. The other upside is that great developers can learn a new language as storied and flexible as Perl quickly, even if they spent much of their time in university coding in Java. As Paul Graham, the legendary founder of Y-Combinator found using an unfashionable language acts as a pretty amazing filter.

Thanks XKCD for the image

Accelo is now a robust and comprehensive product which takes advantage of a diverse set of technologies and languages, and as a browser technology that has become a commonly used computing interface, our code is moving to the client side (hello, AngularJS) more and more - but having the ability to quickly build and iterate on the back end in Perl is awesome. 

Perl also makes it easy for us to quickly build out our integrations. It's easy for us to plug into whatever web service we need, be that XML, JSON, and even, shudder, SOAP - without needing to rely on vendor-provided wrappers that often limit functionality. Perl has also made it allowed us to build high-performance two-way integrations of email, calendar entries, contacts and tasks with Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, as well as financial integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and Saasu.

A couple of weeks ago one of our engineers noticed that the Perl community was organizing a special kind of Hackathon, in Berlin. The event will bring together some of the best Perl developers in the world to work long and hard on crushing as many bugs as they can from the litany of popular modules provided through CPAN. While the participants continue to be the heroes of open source and working for free, the Hackathon organizers were looking for sponsors to defray the costs of individuals and make sure the event could go ahead.

We're proud to be able to lend our financial support to the Perl QA Hackathon being run between April 16-19, and want to express our massive thanks to all of the members of the Perl community who participate. We're also looking forward to being able to make more of our own contributions into the future as our engineering team continues to grow and our work becomes more unique and valuable to the community that has given us so much.