Concerning the Email Thread involving Reini Urban

[Mike South]

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Adam M Dutko <adam at oktud.com> wrote:

>
>> Awesome. I am still trying to find my niche in the community and would
> love to hear what you and others are working on.
>
>
>  A YAPC really should be about bringing perl forward and talk about
>> hacking,
>> not about our stupid behavior, fights and mistakes we do online.
>>
>
> Is there "one thing" we can all agree upon that will help move Perl
> forward? Again, I'm somewhat new and trying to find a niche. Any and all
> advice is welcome but it would be nice to know what "single area" would
> help the most.


Dude, if we could all agree on One Way To Do It we would be Python
programmers.

:)

My advice would be for you to just use Perl.  And when you run into a
problem or a frustration--"I don't understand this in the docs of this
module", or "I wish this would accept an array instead of a single
value"--figure out how to fix it.  By doing that, you will learn how to
contribute (whether that's by sending a patch, just suggesting a change,
forking on github and sending a pull request, etc), which will be useful
knowledge no matter where you end up spending most of your time.

If you are anxious to jump in and make a contribution right away, you could
build an app from the ground up using a framework like Catalyst or Dancer
and document every single thing that confused you, and the resolution, and
put it all in a series of blog posts.  IMHO, Catalyst could use this due to
its complexity, Dancer due to its newness (and, possibly, due to its lack
of complexity--sometimes it can be confusing when so much is done by magic,
because you don't know where to even start looking to figure out what the
magic words are).

Experienced people can't do this (or at least not easily), because they've
completely forgotten what confused them when they first started.  It's a
contribution that only a newbie can easily make.

Caveat lector--I'm on the early part of the contribution curve myself, so
ymmv and there may be much better opinions out there about where your
effort would be best spent.

mike
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