A very modest[1] man in need of praise

Last week the very well-known and indominable force of nature that is Dave Cross was kind enough to mention Matt and I in a list of people in his article The Without Whoms, who had done good work in 2009 for the Perl community. Specifically he mentioned the work we did on the Ironman blogging competition. I found this strangely humbling as I have a great deal of respect for Dave Cross and so in return I will try to capture a little of the impact of this man.

Dave is the founder of the London Perl Monguers and has been a principal force in both the bringing into being of the YAPC Europe conferences and the London Perl Workshop. He has spoken as the Keynote speakers at both 2008 and 2009, he has also presented free workshops at conferences to encourage new, or greater, participation in the community.

Aside from running a vast number of projects to be found on CPAN and on his Github Page Dave maintains a number of Blogs. These are: Perl Hacks; davblog; as well as administering: Blogs at Perl.org; and tweeting happily here: Davorg on Twitter where he is possibly the greatest human being ever to hold the title Davorg; slicdes from his conference presentations are updated to Slideshare for all to view.

More information on Dave can always be found on Dave’s personal website, which is kept up-to-date (and I swear he must have a team of immigrant children working in a sweat shop somewhere to track all that he does and update all this).

Professionally Dave is well respected for his training courses that have been run at many conferences and workshops with O’Reilly, UKUUG, YAPC and others all desiring his services. His company website Magnum Solutions has a full list of details about these.

There is still more that can be said about Dave Cross. He is constantly supportative of the local community around him as is shown by the number of Planet sites he has built, or is involved with:

The Planetarium;
Planet Balham;
Balham Twits;
SW12 Org;
Planet Westminster;
The Political Web;

This list doesn’t include the fact that Dave is always on hand on varioius IRC channels, or in person at community events to give advice, offer help and support and generally be an all-round excellent
person[2].

This list is not exhaustive or complete, and any errors or omissions are mine and i would be glad to correct them. Please send me an email to add a comment to this list about Dave.

[1] Dave may or may not be modest, I only believe so from personal experience and the fact that he didn’t do anywhere near enough blowing of his own trumpet in his article.

[2] He makes all the girls and boys moist with anticipation.

-ttfn – Mark

My Ironman Status

While in Lisbon at YAPC::EU::2009 I was fortunate enough to talk to Aaron who is an avid Perler and member of the Edinburgh Perl Mongers. Without going into too much detail it is enough to say that Aaron is a member of the Reg team and we had a discussion about pushing the Perl envelope. Specifically how to get Perl back into the consciousness of the wider world. What we decided was to try and get regular articles about Perl out into the world. We decided to start with the Reg as Aaron felt sure he could get a positive response.

Well he went away and he did get a good response. If we can produce the articles the Register may print them, but we will need to keep up a steady flow, about one a week.

Now we have to fulfill the other part.

The Numbers

Here’s the basic upshot. I need authors. A lot of them, the reason I need a lot is to cut down the strain and I’ll explain why. Aaron and I have managed to get the opportunity for a weekly article on a Perl subject to be printed on the Reg. If 4 people take on this task they will each have to write at least 13 articles in a year, if it is 8 the figure halves and so on. So I want 52 people, minimum

If we have 52 authors we can pair up on articles, two authors working with each other to write/edit their work and get an article turned around in good speed. So we would have 2 articles a year each and the possibility of editing another 2 – and I’ll cover that in a minute as we think of peer editing and article groups.

Of course if we have 104 people or more it becomes 1 a year and the task gets so much easier for all.

Editing and Themes

The idea of writing the articles is that they would be short pieces. Maybe 500 – 3,000 words in each maximum and I think it would be good if we set ourselves themes to cover. These themes would be things such as:

Begining Perl - articles on how to get started in Perl

Windows Perl - articles on setting up and running Perl on Windows

Projects - a series of articles introducing some of the bigger projects – Moose/Catalyst/Padre/Raduko/Mojo/Dbic etc. – with the idea that we can introduce and explain how to use these projects

Using Perl – companion articles to the begining/using Perl with the idea of using specific projectsd to achieve aims

Modern Perl

Enlightened Perl

There are obviously others but this is a start.

We would assign groups of people to one ‘theme’. So if we had four articles on Moose Roles we would attempt to assign 8 people. This working group would be responsible for writing/editing the 4 articles between them (hopefully drawing on their respective different strengths) and thereby reducing the stress even further from one pair.

These are my initial thoughts.

I will be returning to this theme in my next post when I want to talk about the conditions the Reg requires and what we do with the articles once we have them published/written and in one place.

What I really need is…

VOLUNTEERS

Stop thinking that you couldn’t do a task like this. You can. You will not be alone. You will be at least one of a pair, in a working group of maybe six or eight and part of a wider group who can help you. And you will be helping the community in a huge way. If there are people who want to write articles on their own, that is also cool, we will work with peer review and editing in the same manner. All contributiuons will be useful. I will also need people to help me control who is writing what, where and when. Controlling submissions and tools for co-operative collaboration – so you people who think you can do that should also be raising your hands.

So sign up now. Or else I will find you…

Please email Mark Keating at:

m(dot)keating(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

In the beginning…

An apology (apple-ogies), for my wanton use of a simple post to keep my Ironman-ish status. This week I have mostly been on holiday in the wilds of Scotland – to whit I have been camping in the Inner Hebrides around Mull and Iona and on the mainland near Glen Nevis so haven’t been hugely internet-connected or Perl involved. For this reason this post is thinly connected .

So what can you post about?

Well actually I can continue to post about Lisbon as there are a few more things I wish to share with you all. And this week I would like to share some pictures.

So still a cop out then?

Not really, didn’t you just hear me apologise? Alright, still a bit of a cop-out if you want to view it that way, but really it isn’t. My intentions when deciding to join the Ironman challenge were to put a slightly different slant on things and not just to blog about the language of Perl but the community and the people and this is just a continuation of that.

So where are the pictures?

Just keep scrolling down and you’ll get to the pictures. I am deeply indebted to all the great people at the conference for looking so good in these images and to (mostly) ignoring the random git with a camera. A special thanks to Andy Armstrong who gave me the idea of putting these people into grayscale by doing that himself and making it look so damned good.