I'm part of the Network Services Group. We provide services such as email
for faculty, staff, students, alumni, etc.
I do a lot of programming, mostly in Perl. Perl is my favourite language.
I'm constantly amazed at how much I can do with it in a short amount of time.
It is powerful, meaning that a few statements get a lot of things done. But
it isn't overly cryptic (if you use it with the intent of being
understandable, with appropriate documentation), and therefore easy to maintain.
I found the
Perl
Cookbook to be a great resource.
Also, there are a lot of modules available, e.g. from
CPAN, which really help.
Most of my programming is systems stuff: making the infrastructure work
so that users can use the system. A lot of that deals with accounts. We have
one set of accounts: UTORids. That is used in a lot of services: email,
calendar, web accounts, etc. So the systems programming makes sure that the
right accounts end up on the right servers for the right services.
Other programming deals with monitoring (making sure systems are running),
statistics gathering and presentation, and generally trying to make running
these services on all our machines easier.