Modern Perl

http://profiles.perl.org ???

One thing that I've been thinking about as I've been trying to finish the first draft of the proposed recruiter help page (see previous blogs about this) is how I wish I coul find a way to better bridge the gag between the "Perl.org" community (basically Perl programmers that are active by contributing to CPAN, blogging, attending conferences, etc.) and the greater Perl community.  You see, I just don't want to tell recruiters to look at CPAN to find good Perl programmers.  Not only is that not fair to the vast numbers of great Perl programmers that just never wrote a CPAN module, or had time or could figure out how to contribute to an existing project, its damaging to CPAN since it could lead to people 'gaming' the system by spamming CPAN in order to raise their profile.

I know a lot of Perl programmers use Linkedin, and there are a number of Perl Linkedin groups that are variously active.  Recruiters do use this.  However, Linkedin is not always the best place for recruiters to look since a lot of people have some Perl experience and write that on their resume, leading to a lot of false hits when recruiters search.

So I was thinking maybe we could create a profiles.perl.org which would just be single page precis for any Perl programmer than ways to belong.  We'd have to make it crazy easy to setup, but perhaps it could be a way to begin to entice our various groups to co-mingle a bit more.

Overkill?  Just continue with Linkedin, Facebook, etc?  Opinions?

Catalyst Poll Closing Friday, August 10th

I am closing the Catalyst Poll tomorrow at NYC noon (Friday, August 10th).  So all you laggards, this is your last chance to take the Catalyst Community Poll and impact where the framework will go next.  So if you care about how our precious volunteer resources are spent (docs, or more code?  Do we religiously maintain backward compatibility, or is the next version of Catalyst going to really make big changes) you should head over and have your say.

Over the next week I will start to analyze the results and post my findings (as well as the raw data to let you draw your own conclusions).  After that we will start to talk about when the online 'Town Hall' meeting will happen.  Stay Tuned!

(FYI: Here in the US a Town Hall meeting indicates a big meetup of all concerned citizens, community leaders and political figures.)

A Quick Update On The Catalyst Poll

So we launched last week  a poll aimed generally at people using Catalyst in an attempt to start a dialog about where the Catalyst webframework is going to head over the next few years.  So far over two hundred of you stepped up to fill out the poll, which is great to see!  A few interesting details so far:

Most of those who filled out the poll identify themselves as web developers who are rather familiar with Catalyst, who use mostly newer versions of the web framework on recent versions of Perl.  You are in general happy with Catalyst, but would love to see more blogging about how to use the framework, and you'd like to see a balance between documentation and new code.  You are excited about new features, but have no understanding of the logn term project goals and feel confused about how to help achieve them.  Additionally you'd prefer a moderate time between releases (perhaps based around quarterly, not weekly goals, might be one interpretation).

This is all great information for us to have, and its awesome we are getting this conversation going.  However I am a bit worried that so far we are a pretty self selecting group.  I know there are a lot of people dealing with legacy Perl and Catalyst, and there are people who consider themselves new to the framework and would like to find a way to help.  So I'm going to hold the poll open for a while longer and reach out especially to people who are not already very familiar with Catalyst to please come and help us help you better.  I need the thoughts of people outside of development, such as admins / webops as well, and in particular I want to hear from people that have older version of Catalyst installed and who are just maintaining stuff.

And if you don't particularly love Catalyst, I want to hear from you as well.  Just because you are doing all your new development in other frameworks or (gasp) other languages, knowing what you think would help us understand better the problems that caused you to decide Catalyst is no longer working for you.  You never know when your job situation might change, and you end up maintaining some Catalyst application, and in that case I want to see if we can better understand your issues so that experience is better.

So in general I want to get more diversity rolling here! 

Thanks!