Results tagged “about”

My name's Steve Marvell and I'm Proud to Use Perl.

I remember a day in the final term of University, some 13 years ago, when I asked a good friend of mine what I should learn next. He said "Learn Perl Steve" and so I did. This would have been around the time that Perl 5 came out. I learnt it with a pocket guide, at work and did some quite exciting things with next to no code. I was hooked.

Since then, I've worked pretty much exclusively with Perl for all manner of projects including Information Retrieval, Fraud Detection and Statistical Genetics. I presently run a small software engineering company which works almost exclusively with Perl.

I have been an on and off user of Perl Monks and started the Devon and Cornwall Perl Mongers user group which is pretty tiny, to say the least.

I've done quite a bit of book reviewing for O'Reilly and Manning and have an extra special mention in O'Reilly's Perl Graphics Programming, which I'm very proud of.

Let me introduce myself as Yet-Another-Author of PTUP. I'm Michael Peters (mpeters on irc and use.perl, wonko on CPAN).

my $work == 'Plus Three';
my @interests = qw(
    qa-and-testing
    scaling-and-performance
    ui-design
);
my @tools = qw(
    CGI::Application
    mod_perl
    vim
    linux
    MySQL
    Prototype
    jQuery
    swish-e
    spread
);

my @projects = qw(
    Smolder
    Krang
);

I've lived and worked in Tennesee, Maryland (DC suburbs) and am now living with my family in Raleigh, NC. I've spoken at lots of YAPC::NAs (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005), a couple of ApacheCon's (US 2006, EU 2006) an OSCON (2007) and a PPW (2006). At my current job I do a little bit of management, technical planning, programming and system design.

The name of this blog gives the impression that it might be all about Perl evangelism. I'm not a good evangelist (even though I spent 2 years as a missionary) so I probably won't be providing a lot zingers to convince your coworkers to use Perl. I'm just planning on writing about how I'm using Perl: module reviews, Perl related tools and other things happening in the Perl community that make me excited.

Perl's not the coolest language around right now, but I've always been more of a fan of the underdog. I'm also an optimist which means that I'm really excited about the potential of Perl 6 and Parrot, so I'll probably be talking about those too.

Following Dave Cross' example, I suppose I should write something about who I am and what I know about Perl, the Mongers, and the other communities and tools associated with the language.

I am a spanish software engineer born in São Paulo, Brazil. I grew in the big city, where my first contact with the Internet and with Perl happened at the same time, around 1996, at the São Paulo State University. I was fascinated by the regular expressions support Perl offered (much better than the clumsy /usr/bin/awk support, just to name an easy one), and learned fast. I've been working as a Perl programmer for a living since then, always combining it with my system administration skills.

I learned about the Perl Mongers and the Perl Mailing Lists in 2001, when I subscribed to the London Perl Mongers and contacted Dave Cross, requesting him to help me out re-activating the São Paulo Perl Mongers community (there was a website and a mailing list, but no subscribers).

I moved to Lisbon after several years of leadership of the SPPMers leaving a new leader and a group with almost a hundred subscribers there. In Lisbon, I joined the Lisbon Perl Mongers. After a while, personal reasons drove me out to the Netherlands, where I joined the Amsterdam Perl Mongers, a highly technical and skilled PM group.

Since the beginning I admired the work and effort of the London Perl Mongers, and made them my model. And I am proud of it, and became even more proud when Dave Cross invited me to write on this blog. I hope proving myself worthy of this honor and privilege.

I should, I suppose, say a little bit about who I am and what I know about Perl and its community.

I discovered Perl in about 1996 after almost ten years using C on both Unix and Windows. I started using it in basic data munging tasks and soon moved on to simple CGI programs. It has been my most used programming language ever since. It's how I make a living - usually programming, but I also run the occasional training course.

In 1998 I started the London Perl Mongers - one of the first Perl Mongers groups outside of the USA. I led the group until 2001. In 2002 I became The Perl Foundation's Perl Mongers User Group Co-ordinator, liaising between the foundation and the local Perl Monger groups. I held that post for four years. For my contributions to the Perl community, I was awarded a White Camel in 2004.

I wrote Data Munging with Perl and was a co-author of Perl Template Toolkit. I'm a regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences.

Oh, and I'm very proud to use Perl.

The Perl community is huge, disorganised and (mostly) an incredible force for good in the world or Open Source Software and IT in general. And sometimes I think we have a tendency to forget just how impressive the community can be. We have achieved some phenomenal things over the twenty or so years that Perl has been around. We have a lot to be proud of.

That's what this site is for - to remind the Perl community about what it has to be proud of. We'll be writing articles about some of the impressive things that the Perl community has done. That will include infrastructure like CPAN and cool modules as well as more "people-powered" achievements like Perl Mongers or Perl Monks. Think of it as being a bit like a geek version of the Guardian's "In Praise Of..." leaders.

We plan two or three articles a week. Which, by my, reckoning gives at least a few months worth of articles. But if you think of something that we seem to have missed, then please let us know.