My previous job was with a company that was wedded to UNIX and Perl. This was where I was introduced to it and taught how to develop with it.

After some time out I got involved in .NET and their framework, and all it's related inflexibility - having to use CSS controllers to get it to render acceptable HTML that was not table based.

When starting an outside of work project I decided to get back into a language that I enjoyed the most, Perl.

Working on it has been a real pleasure, no constaints or restrictions, just total control and supported by any hosting company.

My Mac Mini has been set-up as a development environment and I've been using ActiveStates Komodo Edit 5 to develop. Their editing software has been fantastic, as has the Mac development environment.

The site has been going now for a couple of years and is really starting to come together. I've been using an agile approach, small releases over time to slowly improve the site.

It's now in a pretty good state that stands up well to its competitors. Homehomehome is a bespoke e-commerce site that does all of the complex work in the back end. It enables full product adminstration, which then generates shtml pages which are search engine friendly and very quick to serve up. This is all Perl driven with xml data storage.

Adding to and developing the site is a real pleasure, such as the new search functionality. What other language can filter, sort and step through a hash of data with one line of code?

Keep up the good work all Perl developers!