At $work, I got a new production server. Setting everything up (from a fresh Debian testing install to a running webapp) took mere three hours (one of those was spend finding a patch to a module I never sent to the author..). I can vaguely remeber that the same task took me several days some years ago.
I guess the speed improvement comes from better technolgies (aptitude vs. hunting tarballs on the internet and compiling by hand (and hunting libraries needed by apps/other libraries); cpanplus vs. downloading from CPAN by hand) and better knowledge on my side (eg. compiling perl and mod_perl without needing to look at the docs; having written a test suite for the web application)
And I recieved my copy of Higher Order Perl today. Yay! Can't wait until I get on the subway to start reading...
