[mmaunder]

I worked at the beeb around 2003 and built a very high traffic Perl application for Radio 1 called OneMusic to launch unsigned bands. It was interactive, not static, hit MySQL directly and blazingly fast. Was a huge success using existing libs. This was pre nginx on our public facing Apache/modperl and it handled very high traffic.

BBC did have non static Perl applications so this whole thing is a false premise. They wanted to build a framework.

In 2007 Perl had thousands of MVC frameworks in CPAN. The idea that the solution to static file hosting is to build yet another MVC framework is absurd. They did and were surprised Perl is fast. Yeah. It always was. And they reinvented the wheel.

[mst]

I did two tranches of consultancy at the BBC.

One, I fixed all of that team's problems but because I swore a lot under my breath about their existing code while I was doing so that team decided to be offended and made a decision to never invite me back (note, I quite possibly deserved that reaction, I'm still a blunt bastard but in those days I had the social skills of a thermonuclear device even as compared to now.)

Two, I helped fix the iPlayer 2.0 rollout by spending two days teaching them how to DBIx::Class better and then spent the third day ripping through their code (with the team's encouragement) and managed to save the "show all programs of the same series" feature by breaking (with the PMs and the team's encouragement) its ability to be correct down to the hour across daylight saving time changes by replacing DateTime with Date::Calc.

Damn good fun, and some of the most satisfying in the "I have earned what you paid for this and it makes me happy" days of my career.

I think the only days of work I've enjoyed more were the time I spent two days diagnosing a problem with an NHS cancer lab sample tracking system that turned out to be a weird interaction between three different bugs in various things.

Note: If you were a shadowcat.co.uk customer at the time and were one of the people to whom I said "sorry about this but this is a cancer lab, my previous commitments to deadlines are dead until I get this fixed" and replied with "well, yeah, of course they are, we knew who you were when we hired you, good luck", I love you all.

[damagednoob]

> And they reinvented the wheel.

Buried amongst the comments was this from one of the creators:

> On the live environment we were told at the time we had Perl 5.6, and a few BBC approved perl modules. Nothing more! So that meant that catalyst a other solutions were out.

I guess this could have been a defensive security policy. I think CPAN has had relatively few supply chain attacks like npm, pypi, et al. But that's probably due to it's popularity.