return void;

I finally took the plunge and requested a PAUSE user account. PAUSE, for those uninformed, is the Perl Authors Upload Server. Through this, users are able to upload modules, scripts, and source code to CPAN.

I’ve been writing perl programs for maybe 7 years now but have never found anything I wrote to be useful to anyone other than myself. Then I started reading Linus Torvalds’ book “Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary“. I’m not done reading it yet, but I will post a review when I finish.

In the 10 years or so of using Linux, I’ve never really contributed much. I wrote a quick program over on SourceForge but found I never wanted to use it myself. I’ve contributed a handful of patches to various projects. I even wrote the arbitrary radix parsing code in Rakudo. Yet I’ve never contributed any significant amount of code. I’ve always felt guity about that; like a leech who used other people’s work for my own selfish ends.

Well, that book changed everything.

I’ve got a backlog of a ton of little programs that all solve some domain specific problem. Most have been for school; some are completely boring while some produce highly interesting results. It’s time I start contributing my code back to the world.

I’m not sure what I’ll contribute first. Most of them need to be cleaned up from their current state of “get it working” to publishable code. I’m going to start working on that over the summer. There are a few projects that I am working on, one of them being my thesis, which can all ultimately find their way on CPAN.