This past year of blog­ging has intro­duced me to a wide vari­ety of peo­ple in the Perl com­mu­ni­ty. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their pub­lished work, and even more I’ve ​“met” inter­act­ing on social media and oth­er forums. So this will be the first in an occa­sion­al series high­light­ing not just the code, but the peo­ple that make up the Perl family.

Paul ​“LeoNerd” Evans

I first came across Paul’s work dur­ing his series last year on writ­ing a core Perl fea­ture; he’s respon­si­ble for Perl v5.32’s isa oper­a­tor and v5.34’s exper­i­men­tal try/​catch excep­tion han­dling syn­tax. I inter­viewed him about the lat­ter for Perl.com in March 2021. He’s been active on CPAN for so much longer, though, and joined the Perl Steering Council in July. He’s also often a help­ful voice on IRC.

Elliot Holden

Renowned author and train­er Randal L. ​“mer­lyn” Schwartz linked over the week­end in a pri­vate Facebook group to Elliot’s impas­sioned YouTube video about his day job as a Perl web appli­ca­tion devel­op­er. Through his alter ego Urban Guitar Legend Elliot is also a pas­sion­ate musi­cian; besides gig­ging and record­ing he’s been post­ing videos for nine years. (I’m a bit envi­ous since I took a break from music almost twen­ty years ago and haven’t man­aged to recap­ture it.) Elliot seems like the quin­tes­sen­tial needs-​to-​get-​shit-​done devel­op­er, and Perl is per­fect for that.

Gábor Szabó

Gábor is a poly­glot (both in human and com­put­er lan­guages) train­er, con­sul­tant, and author, writ­ing about pro­gram­ming and devops on his Code Maven and Perl Maven web­sites. He’s also the founder and co-​editor of Perl Weekly and recip­i­ent of a Perl White Camel award in 2008 thanks to his orga­ni­za­tion­al and sup­port con­tri­bu­tions. Last year he intro­duced me to the world of live pair pro­gram­ming, work­ing on a web appli­ca­tion using the Mojolicious frame­work.

If you’re on Twitter and look­ing to con­nect with oth­er Perl devel­op­ers, please con­sid­er par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Perl com­mu­ni­ty I’ve set up there. Twitter Communities are topic-​specific mod­er­at­ed dis­cus­sion groups, unlike the free­wheel­ing #hash­tags sys­tem that can be dilut­ed by spam or top­ics that share the same name. Unfortunately, they’re still read-​only on the Twitter Android app, but you can par­tic­i­pate ful­ly on iOS/​iPadOS and the web­site.