So, here's the update I promised last week: I'm thrilled to join DotCloud as a software engineer, starting May.

Many of you have seen the news that they recently shipped the support for its Perl stack that I know a lot of Perl hackers are excited about. As they point out in the post, I contributed my experience and knowledge for them to build the perl support, but it was actually an hour of whiteboarding session to figure out what the right stack would be (i.e. uWSGI and PSGI, perlbrew, local::lib and cpanminus for a start, but more support to come), and the following few hours of hacking to just build it.

It was so much fun and inspiring to collaborate with the co-founders Solomon Hykes and Sebstien Pahl and software engineers Sam Alba and Jerome Petazzoni, and can't wait to see what I can do to make DotCloud even more awesome Platform-as-a-Service provider.

A few quick notes to address your potential concerns. I'm joining DotCloud as a "Software Engineer", not something like "Perl Service Architect". This basically means two things.

a) My ownership on PSGI and Plack software remains the same: No license changes or whatsoever - great thing for all of us. You can expect more improvements now that it's essentially part of my real job, though :)

b) I will spend more time coding Python than Perl at work, since DotCloud is mostly written in Python. If you're upset about hearing that, you just haven't noticed that the past 12 months of my previous job was mostly coding in Python :) Using two different languages and stealing great ideas from each other is a natural thing, especially since I do that for spoken languages as well!

If you have questions, feel free to poke me at miyagawa AT gmail.com or on twitter, and I'll be happy to answer as much as I can. Also, if you want DotCloud invites, I have a few beta codes to give away - tell me what/how you're excited about Perl on DotCloud on Twitter, blog or email, and I will randomly give you invites.

I hope to see Perl deployments beat Ruby and Node.js on DotCloud some day :)