I'm so happy that the White House has fed back to the open source community and, more importantly, advertised that fact.
Remember how fifteen or twenty years ago you'd see mentions of the Internet in popular culture and think "This is really picking up"? That's how this announcement makes me feel.
Robert Spier writes
To match the massive advances in Perl over the last few years, www.perl.org has been brought into the modern era. www.perl.org has been completely redesigned, making it clearer and easier to use. All the content has been reviewed and brought up-to-date to provide links and other helpful resources for both new and experienced Perl programmers.
Thanks to www.foxtons.co.uk for donating time from Leo Lapworth, Stephen Morgan, and Cameron Richmond!
Holy cow is it pretty. Thanks to those who made it happen! The download page is especially handy.
Shlomi Fish wrote in to tell about updates on the site for Perl beginners with which he's involved:
After the last news item, a lot of work was invested into Perl-Begin.org, the Perl Beginners' Site, making it even better than it used to be. Here's a summary of the changes:
Several new topical pages were added:
There's a new IDEs and tools page, featuring some Integrated Development Environments.
A testimonials page was added, with some honest-to-God testimonial quotes which are now featured in the Testimonials side-bar.
There's a new page sporting links to collections of blogs.
A ShareThis button was added to the bottom of every page for easy bookmarking and sharing.
Many writing errors (spelling, grammar, syntax, phrasing, etc.) have been corrected by Alan Haggai Alavi. He seems to have a good eye for catching such problems, and I am indebted to him.
Corrected several broken links including those to Ovid's CGI course.
We hope you enjoy the new Perl Beginners' Site and please recommend it to your friends. All content on Perl-Begin is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence which allows almost unlimited re-use.
These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.
At my family's St. Patrick's Day party, we had the Wii set up and had two guitars going playing Guitar Hero. Quinn, my seven-year-old daughter, was rockin' and showing her uncle Kevin how to play. She was explaining how he had to hold the green fret button AND hit the strum bar right when the green thing crossed the bottom line and once he got it going, and he was able to play "Barracuda," he had a great time.
Meanwhile, other friends and relatives were clustered around, watching with fascination. They weren't gamers by any stretch, most in their 40s and 50s, but I could tell they really wanted to try. When Kevin was done, I took his guitar and held it out for someone on the couch. "Here, you try it," I told her. "Oh, no, that's OK, I don't know how, let someone else play," she said, embarrassed. "It's OK, it's fun, and it's easy once you get the hang of it." This broke her defense and she said "OK, what do I do?" taking the guitar from me. She got the hang of it quickly, loved playing three or four songs, and started trying to get her husband to try it.
It's kind of like someone standing outside of a swimming pool, embarrassed about jumping in. It's clear that people in the pool are having a great time, but for some reason he feels self-conscious. Maybe he's afraid he's not a good enough swimmer, because he can't do fancy dives off the high board. Whatever the reason, with a little encouragement, whether he jumps in the deep end, or just slowly walks down the stairs on the shallow end, he gets in the water and has a great time, and his friends are glad he's in there with them.
Sometimes I talk to people like that standing in Perl. It'll be someone who's been using Perl for years, and loves what Perl does for him, and would somehow like to contribute to Perl, to get into the pool where everyone's having a good time, but he's afraid.
Maybe he's got a module he developed that he doesn't think is "good enough" for CPAN (as if CPAN is 100% stellar). Maybe he fears that he's not a good enough coder to contribute patches. Perhaps he doesn't realize that not all contributions to open source need to be code. Or perhaps he just doesn't know where to start.
Are you that person? Have you wanted to contribute to Perl, or any other open source project, but just haven't? Please let me know your story in the comments.
There have been a number of posts today for Ada Lovelace Day, honoring women in computing.
I'd like to call out a few more Perl people while we're at it:
I'd like to also steal a bit from Tim O'Reilly's article as well. He said:
My first hat tip has to go to my wife, Christina O'Reilly. She's a playwright and choreographer, not a techie. But if you've been influenced by me, you've also been influenced by her.... [S]he's been part of everything I've ever done, in the same way that Elizabeth Barrett Browning said of her husband, Robert Browning: "What I do and what I dream include thee, / As the wine must taste of its own grapes"
In the same way, let's remember our spouses, partners, and other special women in our lives, starting with Larry Wall's wife Gloria, who you've probably seen at Perl conferences keeping things together for the clan.
Whenever you see the work of someone like Josh McAdams, Ricardo Signes, or Casey West, you've got a Heather McAdams, Gloria Signes and Chastity West, and the rest of their families, supporting them. That's community support to remember.
Please add your praise of the women of Perl I've forgotten or don't know in the comments below.
In my job as editor of Perlbuzz, I get email all the time asking me to run announcements about all sorts of Perl-related things. They're usually announcements of a new release of some module, or something about an upcoming conference. And usually I don't run them, because they violate the first rule of announcing something:
An announcement that says "PerlWhacker v1.5.3 has been released" is not interesting to anyone but a small handful of people. The most important part of being interesting is that your announcement has to have an angle.
The angle is the part of the story that says "This is why this is interesting to you, the reader." There has to be a reason that a story is interesting, not simply a recitation of facts. There has to be a hook, a reason for the potential reader to see a headline, or maybe the first paragraph, and say "Huh, I'd like to read that."
Here are some examples.
Finally, you must assume that the reader doesn't know what you're talking about. Most of the announcements I see are announcing to a small group of people who are aware of what is being announced, simply notifying that group that something has happened, excluding the readers not yet in the know.
I'm going to pick on the announcements for Summer of Code, both because they're excellent examples of how to exclude readers, and because I want the GSoC to succeed wildly. That's why I took the time to revamp the announcement when I ran it last night.
The original announcement that Eric Wilhelm ran is this:
The Perl Foundation has been officially accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2009 program as a mentor organization!Hopefully some of you have identified some potential students already. Now we need your help getting them to submit their proposals.
http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/2009/03/tpf-accepted-to-google-summer-of-code-2009.html
The student application period begins Monday, March 23rd and runs through April 3rd. (Students note: you can edit your proposal throughout that 11-day period -- getting it started early and talking to potential mentors greatly increases your chances vs throwing it over the wall at the deadline.) See this page for details:
http://code.google.com/soc/
Interested students and potential mentors, please read the GSoC info on the Perl wiki:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_2009_projects
If you're interested in mentoring or have a good project suggestion, now is the time to get your info up on the wiki so students will know about your code and where to find you.
Eric has done a ton of work for GSoC this year and last, and it's safe to say that the Perl involvement GSoC wouldn't be as great, in fact might not even exist, without Eric's work, so this is no knock on Eric. But this announcement has some huge failings, and it leaves questions in the mind of the reader who doesn't know what GSoC is.
In short, Eric wrote the announcement for the people who already know what GSoC is, and excluded the other 90% who don't. Jonathan Leto's announcement has the same failings.
It makes sense why Eric and Jonathan wrote they way they did. They've been busting their asses for weeks (months?) working to set things up. They've been working inside the echo chamber of other people that are involved in the project. The parts of the project in the forefront of their minds are the details like how to sign up and how to write a proposal. However, to someone unfamiliar, it's noise until he knows the overview.
Whether it's an announcement of your software, or a resume, or a posting in your blog, you have to give the reader a reason to read what you've written. When writing, we tend to focus on the details of the text, expecting that the reader will consume our every word. Problem is, people aren't like that. We skim. We read titles. If it's not interesting we move on.
In my book on job hunting, I hammer home the idea that without a compelling summary at the top of your resume, the reader is not going to spend much time digging the good stuff out of your bullet points at the bottom. It's the same rule with announcements about your software project.
Next time you're going to announce something, show the announcement to someone who is not involved with the project, maybe a co-worker or your spouse. Ask him or her to explain what you're announcing. Try to understand how your article sounds to someone unfamiliar with it. Your project's success may rely on it.
Thanks to Perlbuzz reader James Robson for updating the Perlbuzz logo. It's a little more polished, and it's smaller so not quite so imposing on the front page. Now if only I understood all the CSS magic in the templates that I need to override. I love Firebug but I still don't get what I need to adjust to tighten up the yellow bar.
This year, I'm only listing a few Perl things I'm thankful for (still have to make corn souffle for dinner!), and I leave it to you, the Perlbuzz readers, to tell me yours. Here's last year's list.
I know, I talk about Devel::NYTProf a lot, but it's such a huge leap forward in technology for us. I love love love it.
I'm about as far from Milwaukee as I am from Chicago, and Web414 is a great community of people. It's not all Perl, and not all programmers for that matter, but I'm glad they're there. I'm especially glad for Bucketworks and the amazing space they have there. If Pete Krawczyk (see below) and I organize another hackathon, it'll be at Bucketworks.
Is there anything Ricardo doesn't work on? He's Mr. Email, he's got an assload of modules on CPAN, and now he's trying to replace Module::Starter for module maintenance. Someone out in Pennsylvania needs to buy him a beer for me.
Besides being a relatively unsung guy who makes a lot of things happen, like being instrumental in organizing two YAPCs and a hackathon, Pete happens to be physically close by most of the time, usually in a cube kitty-corner from me, and I can bounce all my crazy-ass ideas off of him. He's one of those people who doesn't get the spotlight, but makes things happen behind the scenes.
I'm very excited about the progress that Parrot is making, hurtling to version 1.0. It's the basis of Rakudo Perl, but it also will help bring Perl culture out into the open again.
I'm thankful for you, the Perlbuzz reader, because you're going to let everyone else know, either here or in your own blog, what you're thankful for in the world of Perl this year.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and I can't wait for my post-turkey nap.