Fastmail’s Contributions to the Future of Email at the Perl Toolchain Summit

Fastmail CTO, Ricardo (Rik) Signes, and Backend Team Lead, Matthew Horsfall, joined world-class open-source developers at the annual Perl Toolchain Summit.

Fastmail was thrilled to participate in this year’s Perl Toolchain Summit in Lyon, France. After the event’s 3 year hiatus, Fastmail CTO Ricardo (Rik) Signes and Backend Team Lead, Matthew Horsfall, were beyond excited to join fellow coders and make Perl even better. The Perl Toolchain Summit is an event that brings together key developers of the Perl Toolchain. Perl is a high-level, open-source programming language, sometimes called the glue that holds the Internet together. Developers who maintain the CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, are volunteers from all over the world who come together to fix bugs, deal with incompatibilities, and update the whole CPAN toolchain to prepare for the future.

During his time at PTS, Rik completed some fascinating work. He collaborated with other brilliant coders and developers to make important decisions regarding the future of Perl and updates to the network. His work was primarily focused on PAUSE: the Perl Author Upload SErver. This is where coders go to upload new software to the CPAN and manage the permissions of packages they have already created. Rik’s work this year was focused on refactoring the code for future maintenance and improvements on the PAUSE indexer. This meant writing more tests, improving testing libraries, and fixing some bugs while doing it.

Fastmail is proud to contribute to the future of open source software. Thank you to the Perl Toolchain Summit for having us and to Rik and all of the other contributors for their hard work at this year’s meeting.

From left to right: Kenichi Ishigaki, Rik Signes, Matthew Horsfall, and Andreas König at the 2023 Perl Toolchain Summit

To read more about Rik’s adventures in Lyon and the specifics of his work at the Perl Toolchain Summit, check out his blog!

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