New Course: Parallel programming in Perl

In the last few days I have been working on a new Perl course. It is called Parallel processing in Perl and it is being sold on Teachable now.

I prepared several examples showing speed improvement when using fork in Perl. Rented a server at Digital Ocean so I can show what happens if you have 32 cores. It was interesting. I was a bit nerveous while recording it as that server is rather expensive. About $640 / month.

But it is funny. I should do it more often to get used to it. After all that is still only $1/hour and they actually charge by the minute or by the second. So if I turn it on to record some videos that take 20 minutes it is still less than a $1. A laughable amount if we compare it with the potential gain. Both for the course and for myself.

Even though I knew the material quite well it took me a few days to prepare the examples and the slides and even during the recordings I had to update many of them to include more interesting example.

I recorded almost 90 minutes already and for some of the videos I had to do several "takes". It takes some repetition till I figure out more or less what I want to say.

I still have not got to the "real" part of the course though. So far I "only" explained and showed how fork works, but did not show any of the examples that I wanted to improve the speed. I guess it will take a few more days.

Nevertheless I published the course and created discount coupons for the Perl Weekly readers for the followers of my Perl Maven LinkedIn page and for the followers of my Perl Maven Facebook page.