Cultural Cuisinart

Today was a great day. I spent a nice chunk of my morning working on a Perl script to process this file we've been having trouble with. The basic gist was - we had an LDIF file that was a zillion lines long, and at the end of each block of text in the file, there were these offending lines of text that were breaking our importer program. My little script read the LDIF file, stripped out the bad lines of text, and wrote the results to a new LDIF file.

Now, I know this is going to sound boring to non-tech people, and probably really easy to tech people, but it was still really satisfying for me. This sort of thing was why I got into computer science in the first place. It's awesome to create something, and then see it in action. I could watch my script run, and then watch the new LDIF get processed, saving us a ton of manual work. My current job doesn't really afford me a lot of opportunities to be a hardcore coder (writing code every day) anymore, so I relish these moments.

This was also my first experience really working with Perl. I had dabbled before, but doing exercises out of a book isn't the same thing as using Perl to solve a real world problem. It's a fun language - very cool stuff.