[oak perl] Introduction

[Steve Fink]

George Woolley suggested to me that many times newcomers introduce 
themselves to the list.

And from reading through the archives, I can see that he's a bald-faced 
liar. I didn't see anyone else doing that.

Or maybe I just didn't read enough. Are the introductions specifically 
archived anywhere? I guess I'll go ahead anyway.

My name is Steve Fink. I've heard about PerlMongers for some time, but 
only recently got around to looking for a nearby one to go to. I've now 
attended the Silicon Valley PM a grand total of one time, and enjoyed 
it. Now I'm looking for a more active group, even if I have to drive a 
bit farther. What I liked about svpm was getting exposed to people who 
use and learn Perl in very different ways than I do. I hang out on 
perlmonks.org a fair amount, but that's a typically digital age-ish 
self-selected environment: I only look at nodes that are relevant and 
similar to the sorts of problems I work on all the time, so don't get a 
very good feel for what the other 99.4% of the community is thinking about.

Anyway, back to my bio. Um... <http://foxglove.dnsalias.org/~sfink/>. 
But that's too much bother, so:

I've been using Perl for 11 years, addicted for 8. I started out mostly 
using it for text munging as a part of other projects, then started 
using it a little for system administrationy stuff, then for entire 
applications, graphical and otherwise. After that I started using it for 
web development (LAMP stuff), and currently have it embedded into a 
real-time interactive graphics engine that you may have seen at the 
Metreon, Great Mall, or NikeTown. Along the way I've written a few 
modules (eg Math::Calc::Units), miserably failed to take over 
maintainership of another module (CGI::Test), did a fair amount of early 
development work on Parrot (I was the 0.0.8-0.0.11 release pumpking), 
and am now infrequently working on the prototype Perl6 compiler 
(supposedly focusing on the rule engine but in reality spending almost 
all of my time on the compiler infrastructure so that I can get to the 
interesting bits of the rule engine.)

I like Perl because it allows me to very directly and quickly express in 
code the things that I want to do, and because it makes me feel like an 
idiot no matter how much of it I know. I also like talking to other 
people about Perl because they make me feel irrelevant -- my experience 
and ways of doing things always end up being ridiculously mismatched to 
what those other people actually care about. One of the joys of TMTOWTDI.

And I won't be seeing any of you tonight because my sister-in-law is 
visiting.