[Canberra-pm] Introductions

[Paul Fenwick]

G'day Everyone,

I'm shamelessly using Andrew's post as a template.  ;)

I'm a Canberra PM member who doesn't live in Canberra, however I get to 
frequent Australia's capital on a regular basis to present courses.  I 
work with Jacinta at Perl Training Australia, which we founded around 
three years ago.

It's pretty easy to say that I do everything.  System administration 
(both PTA's machines and those of many clients), software development, 
performance tweaking, code auditing, course-writing, article-writing, 
presenting and public speaking, accounting, management, finance, and 
secretarial tasks all form part of my regular week.

Like Andrew, I'm a member of SAGE-AU, and while I look after probably a 
dozen Debian machines, I'm not actually a Debian developer myself.

I use Perl for everything.  Monitoring of machines and scheduling 
backups, web-based applications, data processing, statistics, traffic 
metering, mail processing, clients for games, information gathering, and 
countless other tasks.  I've been involved in some very large 
(commercial, closed-source) during my time as well.  I'm also not afraid 
to write in XS and C when something is particularly suited to the task.

Given Perl's extensive list of Inline:: modules, I get to do most of my 
development in Perl, and can use other code and libraries when I need 
them.  I'm a big believer in Perl's interoperability.

Unlike Andrew, I also use Perl for CGI programming.  In this case, 
mod_perl and HTML::Mason are my weapons of choice.  Mod_perl provides an 
incredible amount of speed, power, and control, and HTML::Mason offers 
great flexibility, rapid development, clean design, and simple code.  I 
can *strongly* recommend anyone who's still writing old-fashioned CGI 
scripts to look at Mason (http://www.masonhq.com/), as it's one of the 
sexiest and well-developed tools for web applications today.

I'm involved heavily with Melbourne Perl Mongers 
(http://melbourne.pm.org/) and the up-coming Open Source Development 
Conference (http://www.osdc.com.au/).  I'm an infrequent contributor to 
P5P, although see 
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3385381 for a brief 
moment of fame in that circle.  I've been published in The Perl Journal 
(back when I had more time), and I'm also presenting a full day tutorial 
on Perl Security at SAGE-AU 2004 (http://www.sage-au.org.au/).

Cheers,

	Paul

-- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681