[Chicago-talk] Perl gratitude, 2007

[Andy Lester]

 From http://perlbuzz.com/2007/11/perl-gratitude-2007.html

    Here in the US, it's Thanksgiving, a day of eating lots of food,
    watching football, and sometimes, just sometimes, expressing  
gratitude
    and giving thanks for those things that make life wonderful.

    Here are the things I'm grateful for in late 2007, in no particular
    order after the first.

Google Code

    [5]Google's project hosting service has been a godsend. It's changed
    the way I do open source projects. It has leapfrogged SourceForge  
for
    ease of maintenance, and the bug tracker trumps [6]RT for CPAN that
    we've been using for so long. Add that to the integration with  
Google
    Groups which makes it trivial to create mailing lists, and it's at  
the
    tops of my list for 2007. I can't say enough good about it.

The readers of Perlbuzz

    Eleven weeks ago, Skud and I started this little website called
    [7]Perlbuzz as an alternative to the "more traditional outlets" for
    news in the Perl world. The response has been tremendous. We get 600
    RSS readers every day, and have had over 10,000 unique visitors in  
that
    time. It makes me happy that our little venture is used and  
appreciated
    by the community.

Test::Harness 3.0

    It's been over a year in the making, but the new version of [8]the
    crucial Test::Harness 3.0 means more flexibility for module authors,
    and lots of UI improvements for people who just want to run prove  
and
    make test.

Mark Dominus

    MJD is so much a fixture in Perl it's easy to forget that he's  
there.
    For 2007, though, never mind all the things he's done for Perl in  
the
    past, or the hours I've spent being enthralled in talks of his. His
    [9]Universe Of Discourse blog is the single most intelligent blog  
out
    there, and sometimes it just happens to be about Perl.

Andy Armstrong

    Was Andy Armstrong always around, or did I just not notice? His time
    and dedication spent on climbing on board with Ovid and Schwern  
and the
    rest of the Test::Harness 3.0 crew has been invaluable in getting it
    out. Plus, he's a really swell guy anyway.

Dave Hoover

    When I finally despaired of the amount of time and frustration it  
took
    to organize content for [10]Chicago.pm's Wheaton meetings, Dave  
Hoover
    stepped up and volunteered to take it over. I'm thankful, but not as
    much as I hope the other Chicago.pm folks are.

Perl::Critic

    I'm all about having the machine keep an eye out for the stupid  
things
    we do, and the goodness of [11]Perl::Critic is always impressive.  
You
    won't like everything Perl::Critic says about your code, but  
that's OK.
    It's an entire framework for enforcing good Perl coding practices.

The Perl Community in general

    The Perl community is populated by some tremendous folks. Some names
    are more known than others, but these people help make daily Perl  
life
    better for me. In no particular order, I want to single out Pete
    Krawczyk, Kent Cowgill, Elliot Shank, Liz Cortell, Jason Crome,  
Yaakov
    Sloman, Michael Schwern, Andy Armstrong, Ricardo Signes, Julian  
Cash,
    Jim Thomason, chromatic, Chris Dolan, Adam Kennedy, Josh McAdams  
and of
    course Kirrily Robert. If you think you should be on this list,  
you're
    probably right, and I just forgot.

My wife, Amy Lester

    Because even if she doesn't understand this part of my life, she at
    least understands its importance to me.
      __________________________________________________________________

    I'd love to hear back from any readers about what they're thankful  
for.
    I'm thinking about having a regular Perlbuzz "Love Letters to Perl"
    column where people write about what they love in Perl.

    5. http://code.google.com/hosting/
    6. http://rt.cpan.org/
    7. http://perlbuzz.com/
    8. http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Harness/
    9. http://blog.plover.com/
   10. http://chicago.pm.org/
   11. http://perlcritic.tigris.org/

xoxo,
Andy