Linux and BSD

A long time ago, someone characterized the difference between Linux and FreeBSD something like this: “Linux just hacks stuff in randomly.  BSD guys think about how to do it right, then proceed.”

Given that frame of reference, I think of myself as a BSD style programmer.  It may have taken me a ridiculous amount of time to get Amazon SES up and running, but that’s because I went through the existing open(SENDMAIL, "|$sendmail") style code and replaced it with building the email via Email::MIME, with correct encodings and charsets; now I’m more or less guaranteed to generate MIME compliant messages, without copying around boundary generation etc. through all the places that need to send mail.

And before all that, I had to understand how Perl handled Unicode so that I could understand how to make everything work, always.  For real this time.