Video killed the presenting star…

27 Jan 2012 at 14:49

mdk

London Perl Workshop, Perl Oasis, Videos

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Perl Oasis and LPW2011 Videos: Some Personal Recommendations

In the previous three weeks it has been a pleasure to be able to finally get both the videos for the London Perl Workshop 2011 and the 2012 Perl Oasis videos up on Presenting Perl for the enjoyment of a wider audience.

It is at this point that I can hold out a few interesting videos for people to look for.

It would be nice if I could sit in the position of having watched all the videos, but the editing of presentations is such that one sees quite a lot of the first five minutes and final three minutes, there is no editing as such, the audio and video should stay normalised so the rest of a video is generally left unwatched by the editor, it can be left in the background while performing other tasks.

Therefore like everyone else I must sit down and purposefully find the time to watch the videos all the way through. Something which is a guilty pleasure as I do not need to see them streamed across the Internet but can power up a higher quality original.

The following list then are the few recordings I have managed to see live and one or two others that I have viewed since then, I highly recommend that you watch all the videos if you can, I certainly plan to find the time to if possible.

London Perl Workshop 2011

To begin with the uncomparable Zefram takes us for a stroll through Why Time is Difficult, this is aimed at the casually curious and discusses why it is not just hard to code for time but to understand it at all.

Matt Trout introduces us to some evil in his Lightning Talk Because and also to some usual deep delving into what we can do with Perl as a system admin wishing to access remote systems in What Tak Did.

Mike Whitaker didn’t disappoint on the day with a whole brace of talks, but check out Using PPI for Refactoring and Stop Scratching a call to not keep shaving those yaks.

David Leadbeater once again showed the way with Uniqueness a wonderful lightning talk that secures his reputation for wowing people.

While we are on the subject of Lightning talks do take the time to watch Leon Brocard’s wonderful Lightning Talks Introduction which as always was full of well judged humour, a lightning talk in itself.

For those of us who like Old School tools that can still give great value, and more power, in the modern world should seek out Andrew Ford’s masterful instruction for Latex to EPub with Perl.

Finally there is the fabulous Dave Cross who once again proves that satire is throroughly engrained in the English psyche with the brilliant A Modest Proposal, I never knew that as marketing bod for various Perl things I was in competition with this luminary of the Perlverse.

That’s the lot for LPW, I will work my way through more in the coming weeks/months.

Perl Oasis 2012

This was a fast job for me (turned the videos around in a week from arriving back home) so I have seen less of them, thankfully however I did see some of these live so can recommend:

A Brave New Perl World, Stevan Little tells us why this is an exciting time for Perl core development and to be working in the language.

Chrestomathies by Bruce Gray introduced me to a new word and a competition that we all should be gaming.

Doing the Jitterbug was a great introduction to Continuous Integration for me and I discovered even more about how knowledgeable the great “Duke” really is (you still owe me more whisky btw).

Organising Technical Groups in Meatspace has some great insights and tips to all of us who run a technical group and have issues, Dylan had to overcome a lot of problems in order to get his local group working well and he shares his insights and what these have taught him.

Chris Nehren proved finally that he can get that wry sense of humour he has into his talks with the great lightning talk Software Failure Modes while Rocco does an entire massive talk in 5 minutes in What You Missed and John SJ Anderson impressed with Tweakers Anonymous.

Finally a great deal of fun and a good message was delivered by Cory G. Watson in his Keynote, well worth listening to eventhough there is no sign of Cory due to video cropping issues.

Again there are so many more videos that I am going to have to catch up with.

If any of you are interested I gave a talk on Marketing (part two) at the Perl Oasis and Matt S. Trout and I gave a talk on the Tuesday after we got back from Orlando in Manchester on Business and Community in which we discuss how as a business you can embrace the community (Mark), and as a developer you can immerse yourself in the community (Matt), that may be worth a look if you are either of those people or wishing to start a business based on free software and open source models for commerce.

-mdk

QA Hackathon

23 Jan 2012 at 12:34

mdk

QA Hackathon

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Introduction

The QA Hackathon is a free of charge coding workshop for people involved in Quality Assurance, testing, packaging, CPAN, and other projects related to quality assurance. The workshop is not necessarily exclusive to Perl projects, however, many of the attendees will be planning to work on projects that have a direct benefit to the Perl language.

The hackathon is a three day event that takes place from Friday March 30th to Sunday April 1st 2012. The Perl QA Hackathon 2012 will be held in the beautiful European city of Paris, France, at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.

QA Attendees hacking on code and ideas

2011 QA Hackathon attendees hacking on code and ideas

 

Final Call and Sponsors

Call for Attendees

The final call for attendees has been issued by the QA Hackathon and there is very little time left to consider attending. The closing date for application is the 31st January. You can see more details and register here.

Call for Sponsors

Sponsorship is the backbone of the Perl QA Hackathon as we attempt to provide all our attendees with full sponsorship for travel, accommodation, the venue and some food sponsorship. As such we are continually looking for help from commercial organisations, community organisations and individuals to help support the event.

Since the original call for sponsors we have received a wide range of support:

A number of community organisations and initiatives have sponsored, starting with the QA Hackathon 2011, $foo magazin, Les Mongueurs de Perl (French Perl Mongers) and the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

 

3 community mascots in attendance at the QA Hackathon

3 community mascots in attendance at the QA Hackathon

The corporate sponsors so far have been SPLIO, DuckDuckGo, Diabolocom, Hedera Technology, Dyn, Dijkmat and Jaguar Network.

We have also received donations from a number of individuals including: Franck Cuny, 近藤嘉雪, Tomohiro Hosaka, Syohei Yoshida, 牧 大輔 (lestrrat), Laurent Boivin.

There is no minimum donation and every donation will be gratefully received and will go towards making this a wonderful event. Our hope is to fully sponsor the event with remaining funds going towards next year’s Hackathon.

You can see the current funds raised, the current sponsors and how to make a donation on the QA Hackathon website.

-mdk

London Perl Workshop: The Videos

13 Jan 2012 at 13:50

mdk

London Perl Workshop, Presenting Perl, Videos, Workshop

1 Comment

Once again I ended my year by editing and uploading the videos from a London Perl Workshop and the videos are live on Presenting Perl. And as last year the curse of doing this is following me around.

There was a big glitch in grammar for which I alone must take blame, but I am past it now, it is just another scar on my soul (very prosaic perhaps I should purple a little more and exclaim that every literary effusion I have is now embellished by the memory of such gay laxity).

Coupled to this was the lack of control of the second camera resulting once again in a couple of missed videos and videos that are badly cropped on the second lecture theatre. I could rant more about this as I made some specific requests at the time and I could name names and…meh makes no point, it was a failure in organisation and that’s my responsibility so time to move on and make sense of a solution.

So, I have consulted with a couple of people and hopefully we will have a better plan for this year. After a good lunchtime chat with Ian Norton (idnorton, idn) we came to some conclusions.

Conclusions

1. Let’s try to have operators in each room, this will allow each video to be started and stopped and for some live camera manipulation.

2. Let’s investigate software for maybe ‘live’ video editing or marking of video so that the edit process is faster and cleaner afterwards.

3. Maybe the live editing could have titles, links and parcelling of the files.

4. Microphones. There are issues with sound, so we will investigate radio microphones, or using the room pickups or if we have live edit maybe just plug in a wired microphone and have a sound track recorded simultaneously.

5. Look at high def. web cams as a possible alternative, ones that work with OSS would be best. Maybe have a set of cheap laptops going forward or cheap storage.

6. If we have web cams and an editor/operator in each room we can look at live web streaming.

7. Operators can be room monitors, for timing and other matters.

Anyway, that is the list, there is the plan and I will hopefully have a written guidelines as we do this year’s LPW, and who knows we may get a document guideline for the future.

If you have any experience, ideas, suggestions or just want to get involved to help and ensure we get a better experience going forwards then please get in touch.

NWE.PM: The Shape of 2012

02 Jan 2012 at 17:04

mdk

North West England Perl Mongers, Perl, Perl Mongers

1 Comment

This year the North West England Perl Mongers will once again ‘mix it up’ and attempt to find a comfortable balance for our rather widespread and diverse group. We have decided to have a regular location and format to the meetings in order to bring some stability and try to grow the membership.

So for 2012 we will meet on the last Thursday of each month and the meetings will be held in two halves. We will start by meeting at Madlab in Manchester from 6:30p.m.-8:30p.m. and then go from there to a local pub for a supper and swift amber nectar or two. We are hoping that this way we can have Perl/technical conversations with the option of sharing things we work on or think about in an environment conductive to conversation with a net connection (and the MadLab will allow us to bring food and drink in as well, so long as we clean up around ourselves).

Meetings:
The full list of dates for next year is:
Thursday, 26 January
Thursday, 23 February
Thursday, 29 March
Thursday, 26 April
Thursday, 31 May
Thursday, 28 June
Thursday, 26 July
Thursday, 30 August
Thursday, 27 September
Thursday, 25 October
Saturday, 24 November Hackday
Thursday, 06 December

As part of this Ian and I have decided we will likely take membership at MadLab and will also offer them a free course or two on beginning/learning Perl, we will also have a collection at the meetings for donations to Madlab as a thank-you for providing a great space for groups like us to meet.

Another change we are undertaking for next year is to have less Technical meetings. We will instead be discussing two dates to have a night of technical only talks/activities when we have our first meeting in January, it will replace a regular meeting and will hopefully consist of lightning talks and one or two longer talks.

Thanks to a suggestion by Jess “Castaway” Robinson we will also have three quarterly ‘virtual hackdays’ this year to complement our regular annual hackday in November. These virtual events will be a way for us to continue and improve on the work we start on the annual hackday as will the monthly meetings where we will have the option to discuss and fiddle with whatever takes our fancy. Shadowcat Systems will once again allow people to meet up in person on these virtual days if they so wish.

Hackdays:
Saturday, 24th March Virtual Hackday
Saturday, 23rd June Virtual Hackday
Saturday, 22nd September Virtual Hackday
Saturday, 24 November Annual Hackday

We hope to see you at one of our events, or to join us on a virtual hackday. I will keep you updated on the news/changes as the year progresses.

EPO Site Redesign

30 Dec 2011 at 12:22

mdk

Enlightened Perl Organisation, Google Code-in, The Perl Foundation, Uncategorized

1 Comment

If you haven’t heard already allow me to share with you the fact that the Enlightened Perl Organisation website has had a redesign.

The site had a previous design from circa July 2008 which was done at the time as a JFDI placeholder look while awaiting a new design, unfortunately that weekend effort lasted for three years as many other projects took precedence.

Old look for the site

Old look for the site

This year, as part of the Google Code-in initiative under the banner of the Perl Foundation I asked for a new look to be made and was rewarded by a refreshing view from Webdos:

Fresh new look

Fresh new look

Webdos and I then went back and forth, I updated elements like the logo and the colours to fit with how we portray the organisation, to complete a final look from him:

Almost final design from GCi task

Almost final design from GCi task

From that look I have tweaked and refined slightly to produce the current look which seems to work well on multiple screen sizes:

 

Current 'new look' site

Current 'new look' site

There are one or two more tweaks to do:

  1. The form page uses the old style at present as the code that powers this is being modified;
  2. There are some tweaks to be done for displays on mobile phones;
  3. The SAN and Ironman sites need to be updated, SAN will have the same look and Ironman will adopt several of the stylistic changes into its own new design.

All of these will be done on a rolling basis as the site is further worked upon. the next stage is to get a copy of the existing site onto github so that people can branch and upload changes that can then be spun onto the main site to allow more contributors to the site. I will of course keep you all updated of these changes and provide appropriate links in due course.

-mdk

Google Code-in – Fit the Third

27 Dec 2011 at 14:35

mdk

Google, Google Code-in

1 Comment

(Please note that the figures used in this article are from 12:00 UTC on Tuesday 27th December and they are pulled from a download of data from the Melange interface, the absolute accuracy is dependent on the people providing the data (very good IME) but will, therefore, not reflect the exact situation at the time of your perusal).

The Story Thus Far…

The Google Code-in is an initiative aimed at 13-17 year old school/college students with the idea of getting them involved with open source. Further reading can be found in the first two articles of this series: Google Code-in – Fit the First and Google Code-in – Fit the Second.

Understanding the Figures

It is now approximately five weeks (five weeks and one day totaling 36 days) since the students were allowed to start working on the tasks for this year’s Google Code-In. The initiative is set to run for a total of 57 days for the students to work on tasks with a few extra weeks (mostly before students started) where mentors and organisers have work to do, so there are 21 days of work remaining where tasks can be completed. Since the start of the project there was a further task release (16th December) where we added about 30 more tasks to the initiative.

 

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

 

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

Pie Chart of Days

There has been an impressive amount of work done, and tasks closed thus far.The figures I have collected are:

  1. We have eleven tasks that are currently claimed or have a claim requested, 2.82%;
  2. We have 137 tasks that are closed and completed, 35.13%; (1)
  3. There are 7 tasks currently pending review to be completed/re-opened for further work, 1.79%;
  4. There are 4 marked as needing more work completed on them, 1.03%;
  5. There are 231 tasks remaining on our lists, 59.23%;

 

Chart of Tasks Numbers and Status

Chart of Tasks Numbers and Status

 

Pie Chart of Tasks Numbers

Pie Chart of Tasks Numbers

From these figures we can say that we have completed above a third of all the possible tasks we had for this year. And in the next couple of days as we review, work and close tasks that figure should rise to about 40%. It is still too early, and in a holiday period too hard to guess, what percentage we will reach at the end of the initiative but I am hoping for a rather conservative 50% of the total number of tasks which is a huge figure when we take into account the days worked on the tasks thus far.

The average length of a task, and this is an estimate based on a mean statistical average, is 3 days in length of student time, the mentors will put in anything from a couple of hours to a half day on each task dependent on the complexity and amount of interaction.

To work out this statistical mean I took the list of task lengths:

  • 2 tasks at 4 hours duration
  • 3 tasks at 1 day duration
  • 204 tasks at 2 days duration
  • 131 tasks at 3 days duration
  • 29 tasks at 4 days duration
  • 11 tasks at 5 days duration
  • 1 task at 5 days 10 hours duration
  • 3 tasks at 6 days duration
  • 6 tasks at 7 days duration

Added this up to a total number of expected days: 1,90.78 days total and then divided this by number of tasks (390) which gives us a figure close to 2.8 days (2.79687179.) that I rounded to 3 days average.

This means from the list of Tasks closed (137 or 35.13) we have a total of 383 man days (383.171435 – 137 x 2.79687179) worked by the students on the initiative. (2) So we have in just 36 days done over a years work on Perl projects which is so fantastic that I can do little more than point at these figures and smile broadly.

The completion of one task is a bonus to the organisation, language and projects. the completion of close to 40% of a huge list of tasks in just five weeks is astonishing and the fact that this has brought more than a years worth of work to Perl projects and libraries is stunning. the students, mentors and organisers of this year’s Google Code-in have a lot to be proud about. I look forward to bringing you a final set of these figures in three weeks when we have the close of the event.

If you encounter any of the participants for this year online or offline make sure to add your congratulations for the job they have done so far.

Moar People Please

Student Bodies

We would dearly love to have more students sign up to the initiative so please do your utmost to spread the word around, students and mentors can sign up at any time during the whole of the initiative so it isn’t too late to join in.

If you can put up some flyers, or send them to a local school/colleges technical science/equivalent department there are templates available on the Perl Foundation website:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Mentors

We would also like to make a plea to you all to consider being a mentor, you can take just one task and help a great deal, the typical task takes a couple of hours to review and work with the student, some tasks take more but there is a community of mentors willing to help you in the irc channel #gci on irc.perl.org.

All mentors current and future should add their name to the mentor list on the wiki so that we have a record of who you are for the future so we can all look back and bask in the glory :).

Finally…

If you cannot mentor, if you don’t know students, if you live on a desert island beach that is only visited by lost killer whales looking for an Asda to buy seal steaks at, you at least have an internet connection and you can help spread the word through the social and traditional media channels of our World Wide Webular Community, so please do at least that :).

Thanks in advance

-mdk

(1) However if a task has been closed because it has been unable to be completed, or for some reason along those lines it will be included in these figures.

(2) Please keep in mind that these are statistical averages and although reasonably accurate only a manual counting of exact task lengths will give an exact figure, these illustrations are purely to give an idea of the impact.

Perl Rocks Latin America

06 Dec 2011 at 21:00

mdk

Perl, Promotion

7 Comments

A Perl Team wins a web app. competition

There is often a description, a type, bandied at Perl that you cannot build an application in the language in a short period of time and so it isn’t suitable for the apparent ‘fast-paced’ and ‘flexible’ web development world. A group of Perl hackers in Brazil turned that notion around when they won the W3C(1) competition announced today.

W3C Competiton

The Desarorollando América Latina is a competition to build an application in a short period of time. The rules are:

  • All data used must be public and open;
  • The software must be open source;
  • You have 30 hours to construct the Application over two consecutive days starting on the 3rd December at 10:00 and finishing on the 4th December at 14:00 hrs;
  • There is a maximum 8 persons per team;
  • Live coverage of the event and teams was provided around the clock via an online stream;
  • You must be from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru or Uruguay (afaics).

The prize is to present your application idea to a team of start-ups in Silicon Valley, USA, in the new year.

Forty-seven teams entered this year’s competition which means there were 400 hackers (approximately) working from all across Latin America, there was, however, only one team using Perl, the winning one. There is a full list of the teams (and their apps) here.

The Team

The Perl team that entered was lead by Shadowcat Systems(2) developer, and São Paulo PM group member, Eden Cardim. Their entry was to construct a site that linked Geographical location and crimes committed/reported in that region. You can visit their winning site here.

The polygons that make up the maps on their entry were obtained from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the felony data comes from the Security Bureau of the State of Rio Grande do Sul which is the only organisation that actually releases the data openly.

This page is a good place to start looking at how the data is used.

The team took the data from the Security Bureau and cross referenced it against the maps and that is how they then constructed the maps and data tables for the info-graphics. The data that they obtained had pinpoint latitude and longitude that they had hoped to incorporate but in the end time was against them as the data was in poor shape to manipulate.

The Tools

The Perl team decided to invest in using Catalyst and DBIx::Class as both of these projects are mature with well-supported toolsets and dependency chains and ample documentation. Eden is quoted as saying “in fact, we didn’t even spend a lot of time writing Perl, since it all [Perl, CPAN, Catalyst and Dbic] worked flawlessly most of the time was spent actually beating the data into shape”.

The whole community should be proud of the team and their success and it is a great reflection of how a mature language, the community ethos around Perl, CPAN and associated projects can result in a fast application development under time constraints and in a competition environment.

So in true Perl tradition, please be upstanding and magnaminous in your praise, exuberantly voluminous in your voice while copiously cheerful in the raising of your glasses.

“Hail Perl and the Perl Mongers of Brasil”.

-mdk

(1) The W3C were a major sponsor/infrastructure provider of the competition which is why I am using them as the shorthand term for the event as opposed to the less easy to type and pronounce Desarorollando América Latina.

(2) I just had to mention that Eden has been an essential member of the Shadowcat Team for many years and our faith in him is pretty much obvious when you know of his vast range of talents and deep level of skill in coding with his particular current focus of Perl.

Hack-at-it

06 Dec 2011 at 15:43

mdk

Hackathon, North West England Perl Mongers, Perl, Perl Mongers, Uncategorized

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North West England Hackday 3

Saturday 3rd December was the North West England annual hackday held at the Shadowcat offices in Lancaster once again (for those of you who didn’t know – or just guess – we have been the proud hosts of all three hackdays thus far).

This year the plan was to hack on two different projects and allow others to hack on whatever they wished. We were hampered this year by a massive set of clashes in schedule for various members, this caused us to move the hackday from the 19th November in the first instance and then because of limited numbers signed up as available on the day to limit our focus from a pair of projects to starting work on updating just Presenting Perl.

Presenting the Organiser

Our decision to choose an organiser per project for this year’s event seems to have borne fruit. The notion was that the general day organiser, which was Ian and I, would not have to also organise the whole of the project and tasks. We handed that to Castaway and it worked well enough on the day to insist upon it at future events.

Castaway instigated several decisions and led discussions that resulted in:

  • A decision to hold virtual hackdays each quarter to keep the development going;
  • A decision to use online tracking of tasks management, we chose trello.com;
  • A decision to update the wiki as much as we can as we go along to keep documentation;
  • A decision to use webcams and group (Google+) visibility which does make you feel like you are in the room;

We didn’t manage to do a huge number of tasks in the end though some of us (Jess) got a lot more done than everyone else (industrious beaver), but I think everyone who attended was satisfied that they got something done and they were able to interact and contribute, I would love for the other attendees to give me their thoughts. We noted down what each of us got done on the day, though this list was incomplete as many of the attendees got down to doing things not updating a page of what they had done.(1)

Social Aspect…

As always one of the strongest elements of the day was the social aspect. We were able to work together as a distributed team on a task but also were able to spend time in the company of fellow contributors. The virtual presence of theorbtwo and castaway was particularly good (great idea James) and I think it is something we will have to maintain on future events.

We did have a new member to the group who turned up at the hackday to join in and start socialising with fellow Perlers and that was great, Carl spent a good deal of his day making sure that the new member was made to feel part of the group and answering some questions and queries about Catalyst. The great aspect of a Mongers meet is that you can often introduce people to new things and to help them overcome stumbling blocks in their own code.

In all the day was successful for the social aspects alone, and the fact that we made good headway on the PP tasks and worked out a new schedule and way of collaborating for going forward made it a success as a technical event. I look forward to the next one and will no doubt report on it in here.

-mdk

(1) This didn’t stop me adding some jocularity…

Google Code-in – Fit the Second

04 Dec 2011 at 00:28

mdk

Google Code-in, Perl

No Comments

(Please note that the figures used in this article are from 18:00 UTC on Saturday 3rd December and they are pulled from a download of data of data from the Melange interface, the absolute accuracy is dependent on the people providing data (very good IME) but will, therefore, not reflect the exact situation at the time of your perusal).

The Story Thus Far…

The Google Code-in is an initiative aimed at 13-17 year old school/college students with the idea of getting them involved with open source. The majority of this can be found in the first article of this series: Google Code-in: Fit the First.

Understanding the Figures(1)

It is now approximately three weeks into the project (2 weeks on Monday since the students upped-pens however) and I thought I would give you a quick update of how we are doing so far before I issue my demands pleas for help and crave your indulgence and participation. It would have been nice to run a comparison between this year’s efforts and last years. But the TPF didn’t involve itself as strongly as a mentor organisation last year, we instead participated with the Parrot Foundation and therefore the majority of the Perl related tasks were under the Rakudo project or related to parrot. The project managers at the time were running a new initiative and didn’t have the time in that fledgling environment to gather accurate statistics and these are not available to us through the interface (that I am able to discover).

  • So our current number of tasks stands at an impressive 376 potential tasks for students;
  • There have been 69 tasks closed/completed which is 18% of the total;
  • 12 days Have passed and there are 44 days remaining in the initiative, 78% of the time remains;
  • We have 44 mentors listed in the organisation database;
  • We have 77 students who have taken or completed tasks;
  • There are 261 tasks left in the current group, these are those that are unopened or unclaimed which is 69% of the total;
  • There are 46 claimed tasks or in progress which is 13% of the total;
  • Therefore we have completed/near completed 31% of our tasks (w00t).(3)

Moar Tasks Please

The current group of tasks looks daunting but we still need more, this will give our students a greater choice and help us recruit more students to the initiative. We would particularly love to have tasks from Perl6 which was a tad under-represented in the initial round. We also would love some tasks from the popular modules, frameworks and APIs. Visit the EPO wiki to learn more about the type of tasks and to submit new tasks for the December 16th Deadline.

Moar People Please

Student Bodies

On that note we would dearly love to have more students sign up to the initiative so please do your utmost to spread the word around. If you can put up some flyers, or send them to a local school/colleges technical science/equivalent department there are templates available on the Perl Foundation website:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Mentors

We would also like to make a plea to you all to consider being a mentor, you can take just one task and help a great deal, the typical task takes a couple of hours to review and work with the student, some tasks take more but there is a community of mentors willing to help you in the irc channel #gci on irc.perl.org.

All mentors current and future should add their name to the mentor list on the wiki so that we have a record of who you are for the future so we can all look back and bask in the glory :).(4)

Finally…

if you cannot mentor, if you don’t know students, if you live in a cave that is frequented by an elderly and flatulent wolf who never shares his half of the bills, you at least have an internet connection and you can help spread the word through the social and traditional media channels of our World Wide Webular Community, so please do at least that :).(5)

Thanks in advance

-mdk

(1) Please ignore my very simplistic figure representation, a better statistician, hell a statistician (!), would have done a far nicer, and potentially more accurate(2), job.

(2) So My Statistician joke, while I have you here.

Three statisticians are out shooting ducks.
Statistician One fires, but shoots too high,
Statistician Two fires, but shoots too low,
Statistician Three says, “hey look, I hit it”

(Your groans of pain are appreciated)

(3) If anyone wants to make a pretty chart (not a boring pie chart but something non-Florence and full of 3D snappiness and textual exposition, then feel free and I will add it here :) I could just make an info-chart they seem popular :)

(4) Sounds pompous but for the first time I have mentored two students, they were smart and got the work done with very little help needed from me and we have a great set of completed tasks. So I know how good it feels when you complete something with a student.

(5) Keep your eyes peeled, there will at least be a Fit the Third in this series.

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