[Chicago-talk] Standing on the edge of the pool

[Dan Rench]

I think this mostly describes me, though I'm more like sitting on the
edge with one foot in [1]. I've got a PAUSE account that I intend to
use someday. Contributing a new module to the CPAN isn't necessarily
scary to me, and it's not like I haven't written many, many modules
over the years. It's just that I think most of what I consider my most
useful and interesting Perl code has been either for a job, and
unfortunately not "mine" to share and/or too specific to a job to have
any general use (an interface to the internals of z00m$h at re.c0m's
photo albums written under the influence of mjd's HOP and Ruby,
anyone?)

To look at this from another angle, I've seen how not being "in the
pool" (at least slightly) can mean not just missing out on "fun" but
missing out, period. I had been away from perlmonks for several years
[2] but came back recently, and have been reading, voting, and writing
the occasional answer. And if I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have found
out, to give one example, that calling UNIVERSAL::isa() is now
considered bad form.

PS: Andy, I thought you'd try to work in a Cheap Trick reference, but
then "Standing on the Edge" is nobody's favorite CT LP.

[1] I've made some minor OSS contributions that people actually use:
one patch (with 2 new features) accepted into Apache (plus a couple
others rejected/ignored), the spidermonkey (Mozilla javascript engine)
port for FreeBSD, and I "maintain" (read: haven't touched in years) an
insane Javascript version of Blowfish that I've never had a practical
use for in my own projects, but it has a small user base that I hear
from every once in a while (and usually cannot help).

[2] I think I'm not the only one.