Coming soon ....

I just, y'know, love Perl

Coming soon ....

Currently I work in local government and have been using Perl since 2004 both at work and for private projects. My main areas of interest are Linux & Open Source, to further the cause I'm involved with arranging tech talks for CovLUG. I run Slackware 12.0 on my desktop, but also use my trusty Mac G3. Windows? Huh?

Outside of Perl, I enjoy listening to music and am a member of an amateur dramatic group on the technical side.

I started programming BASIC and Assembler on my ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum from 1980 onwards. Studied a HND in Computer Studies at Coventry, and started commercial programming (C/Unix ... there was no Windows then) in 1986.

As a software programmer & systems designer, I have been involved with the design & development of many different applications, including The System-X Telephone Exchange Design System (using AI & Expert System principles), fruit/quiz machines, The System5 Medical Management Software, many n-tier architecture solutions and Mephisto (a comprehensive web site management tool for LEAs) covering a range of software languages and skills.

In early 1999, a friend went on a Perl course. When I saw what was possible with it, I realised that it was the language for me. Up until that point I had been a dedicated C/Unix programmer and knew most of what there was to know of C, shell script, sed, awk & regexs, so Perl was quite an easy transition.

Aside from being the leader (and co-founder) of the Birmingham Perl Mongers, a speaker at numerous technical meetings, I am also a member of a few other Perl & Linux user groups, an occasional poster on Perl technical web forums, a cpan-tester for Windows and a CPAN author. Also member of the committee to host a YAPC::Europe conference in Birmingham.

My non-IT career involves being a professional lighting engineer, drum technician and roadie. Have worked with many unknowns, a few famous people, but had the most fun with IQ, Ark and Prolapse.

I've been programming since I was about 17 with the Z81 Spectrum Basic, DOS Basic, QBasic, DBase, Delphi and then Perl, all self taught. Being doing Perl over 4 years now.

I took a 3 hour course in programming in FORTRAN in 1980, and started to program as part of my physics course. I also attended a course on microprocessors and digital electronics, and soon realised what I wanted to do in my working life. I got an Acorn Atom in April of 1981, and started to write 6502 assembler code.

I spent a year unemployed from 1982 and spent most of it writing assembler code and Forth. I started working in 1983, and wrote in FORTRAN, and also wrote a CAD system in HP BASIC for laying out circuits. I spent a year working as a hardward test engineer on modems when the circuit boards were 15" x 12". I went to work at the Computational Maths department in Liverpool and wrote image processing systems in FORTRAN, and then used Ada a bit.

I then started to work on writing assembler routines to run on the nodes of massively parallel computers, the nodes initially being T800 transputers, and latterly the Intel i860 processor. I enjoyed the challenge of maximising the performance of the processors. The development was done on Sun workstations - running under SunOS 4.1.3. I was soon generating *lots* of data, which needed processing, and I learned how to use the Unix shell and sed and awk to manipulate it. I read "Programming Perl" in 1994, and started writing Perl, and liked it.

Shortly after that I went to work for a publishers, initially using Perl to convert data from many different input formats to SGML. I was an early adopter of CGI technologies, and showed my organisation its capability, and soon I was developing web-based catalogue systems, many of which used XML as an interchange format.

I worked for a company developing secure web sites, and wrote lots of middleware - all in Perl, though I learned some XSLT here.

I now work in the anti-Virus team at Messagelabs. We scan lots of emails every day, and my team is responsible for ensuring that any email containing viruses is stopped from getting to the customer. Most of the code is written in Perl, though recently we have started to re-implement some of the code in C++ for reasons of performance.

I've been programming since the age of 9 (1976), semi-professionally since the age of 16. I am a second generation programmer, my mother having worked as a programmer at Ferranti in West Gorton in the 50s.

My first programming experience was on the Texas Instuments 58 calculator and then progressed to the Commodore PET. My family had one of the first PETs in the UK - we actually imported it from the US. I then progressed via the Apple to the BBC micro programming mostly in BASIC and 6502 assembler.

I have, somewhat unusually, worked in the same job since graduating University in 1985 and usually give my job title as "Analyst/Programmer" (or if I'm feeling important "Senior Software Engineer"). I work at the Wolfson Computer Laboratory in Birmingham which is most easily described a small medical informatics R&D group. WCL was originally part of the National Health Service, then for more than an decade was part of the School of Medicine at The University of Birmingham and is now back in the NHS as part of University Hospital Birmingham IT services.

Until recently most of my professional programming has been in M and Delphi but now I'm glad to say it's mostly Perl with occasional forays into JavaScript and XSLT.

I have been a frequent contributor to the comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups since 2000 (infreqent since 1998). I went to my first YAPC (YAPC::Europe::2003) as a non-perlmonger and there I ran into Barbie who persuaded me to become a member of Bimingham.pm. I have also published a few modules on CPAN.

I started off designing websites for friends and after leaving university took a job as a junior designer with a Birmingham ISP building sites ranging from cheap buttonised templated jobs given free with hosting accounts to large bespoke solutions and ecommerce ventures.

One year later I was off to the public sector for healthier wages, more responsibility and relative free-reign. Working on the organisations public facing websites and intranet I was pressured to rapidly increase my fairly minimal development skills and began to bridge the gap between the creative and technical worlds.

Since then my focus has shifted more towards coding and project management though I still have my hand in the majority of the designing, standards and usability of the project I work in which gives me a nice working balance.

Professionally I'm currently working in Lichfield for a consultancy and development company on a variety of projects and getting in some freelance work. I'm also continually working on the house Mel and I live together in and furiously planning for our wedding in May this year.

I have been programming since I was a kid and now I do it for money, well mostly.

Coming soon ....

I've been programming since the days of the Commodore vic-20. Have done wide range of languages from assembler to c++, also taught how not to program at university where I did software engineering. Started programming Perl when I joining my current company. I taught myself the basics for the interview and took in a bit of code on a piece of paper. I have now been programming in perl for 2 1/2 years.

I first started to program a Commodore 64 when the example in the book never worked so I re-wrote it. I had never thought about programming before that day. I then went to college to learn properly however only really started to learn when I interviewed and subsequently employed Barbie at the company I worked for.

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Guess I started programming by trying to copy thermal print-outs for the ZX spectrum comprising of it's own sort of 'Basic' and some machine code, doing all this badly and one day finding the spectrum was trashed. It just refused to boot so I got the money back deal from Sinclair to buy a bike. This is a long time ago so I can't remember what year it was, but after this I remember adolescence, unemployment and College. Been programming Perl since 1996. I had started work at a place called Staffordshire University as a technical support person and worked to start with on Linux and Dos/Windows boxes that quickly became NT 4.0 workstations and servers. NT lacked a shell I could program in aside of VB. I don't like VB and try to avoid writing in C as I am by nature a lazy person. I got bitten by the Perl bug soon after I discovered Perl could be downloaded freely from ActiveState for NT and Perl scripts would for the most part work doing basic stuff on both Windows and UNIX. What is more, I found that I didn't have to learn more than one language / scripting tool to automate simple tasks that would work on both platforms.

To my sheer astonishment and unbridled joy I also realised that this Perl thing may be really catching on in more places than the ground floor of the building I worked in. A thing seen at the time as rather 'anoraky' that is, the 'World Wide Web' or 'Internet' was becoming a bit of a thing. Apparently people on this new fangled 'web thang' were using Perl as a sort of 'core technology' in all sorts of things, even web sites but I couldn't at the time understand why or how. Yes, there were then, as there are now, many different languages and technologies to choose from. I could not though be bothered to learn about them all as I had found a programming language that was to me like a 'Swiss army knife'. After all, I thought, Perl may be around for a couple of years yet.

I used Perl in a vain attempt at a template driven static web site generator sort of thing that I must have coded hideously. It never took off amongst my then co-workers. One day much later, working for a company that makes trucks called 'Foden', I was asked to develop a web site on Microsoft IIS and chose to run ActiveState Perl to do this as I found that I could use Win32::ODBC to connect to a Microsoft database. This was a comparatively new thing at the time and you had to code in Microsoft VB or C (which makes me shudder even now) to achieve this, if, that is, Perl hadn't come to the rescue. I corresponded with the author of 'Net::Telnet' on a related project at the time and so discovered a strange and big thing called 'CPAN'. I was bowled over by this 'Comprehensive Perl Archive Network' thing, the likes of which I had never seen before.

Recent stuff I've done is a site management system re-write for the place I work at now (Fujitsu). This is a big one and takes a lot of time. I presently am known to dare to wear a #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; T-Shirt. People on occasions trust me to give them a sensible answer to Perl questions that they sometimes have. They claim that is easier asking me than reading a book, but that's their problem. If anything goes wrong, I didn't do it - OK !!

Coming soon ....

Coming soon .... from our Foreign Correspondent.

I currently work for Delcam Plc, a company that develops CADCAM software to numerous industry markets around the world. My role as the only web developer in the marketing department is to support the creation of corporate and product awareness. I design, develop and manage over 20 websites. I've been with Delcam for over 2 years.

However, I have over 7 years experience in designing and building websites, internets, user interfaces and other online content. After trying graphic design, product design and teaching design packages I finally decided web design was for me and thats all I've done since.

I've been programming since the age of 5 when i got my first computer (amstrad cpc464). I started programming in Perl when a friend of mine introduced me to the internet and CGI at college 5 years ago. I've been working commercially as a developer for 3 years always doing perl (and a bit of delphi).

I started designing on a drawing board when mice were rodents and then discovered computers, then web development and then Perl. I use Perl as it allows me to do do things the way I can do them and there is a great community. It also supports vast colonies of small elf-like creatures who eat brambledock cheese.

I am also the leader of Malvern LUG.

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I started off programming on the BBC Micro, then a bit on the Spectrum, then moved onto various PC BASICs and since then I've been programming C, Perl and latterly C++ with gcc and other Unixy tools on Solaris, Linux and a couple of embedded platforms.

I've been programming (fairly suckily) in Perl for 11 years, mostly for small scripts to manage web pages or when I couldn't face shell scripting. In the last year I've been doing more serious things with it and my Perl has improved a lot.

Amongst many other activities I do a bit of perl. Been a developer since I wanted a bit more power than Cshell for my cgi-scripts, back in the mosaic days when an image tag was a clever thing indeed, and an HTML vocabulary could be written on the back of your hand. I keep meaning to write my first CPAN module, one of these days I might get around to it.

C'mon, if you don't know me by now you must be part of the Borg.