A community collection like CPAN is definitely a “mixed bag,” and no doubt a fair number of the vegetables in that bag are rotten, but most of them are quite good. There are a handful of routines that have been around a long time, have strong outside web-sites demonstrating active support, have a large number of request tickets posted against them but none of them are still “open,” and so on. The hallmarks of kwalitee are there to be found.

Before starting on a project, I always find it useful to spend some “kwalitee tyme” looking carefully through CPAN to see what is out there. In particular, I want to see the approach that various authors have used, knowing that they felt that the work was useful enough that they wanted to make it public. Sometimes that code is a real eye-opener.

What I don't try to do is to use the CPAN code as a “hope-it-works black-box.” I'm happy to use it as a short-cut to what I am doing, and even as a strong influencer of my design ideas, but not as a replacement for my own thinking. (I think you understand what I am trying to say here. I am on cup-of-coffee number-one.)