I worked with Perl for years, and I don’t recommend it for a beginner. There are just too many idiosyncrasies that belong specifically to the language that you’d be better off with Python for learning the basics.

I’m also not really sold on that book, which from the code samples looks really old. I’d recommend two books: Modern Perl and Perl Best Practices.

Edit: I’d also recommend working in Go but potentially the way i/o intersects with interfaces makes it a bit more challenging.

More or less. Either Excalidraw for your quick and dirty diagrams or I’ve used PlantUML + C4 Plug-in for your larger, more long lived diagrams with some success.

Diagrams. Loads and loads of diagrams. One for each use-case.

Then I’d have one diagram to draw out dependencies between each service at the broadest level. Although depending on how messy your architecture is it can be very difficult to read, in my experience.

I feel Lucy’s stories must end up mostly on the cutting room floor

If the outtakes are anything to go by, they do.