11.18
I’ve often wondered what places someone in an open source community. Is it advocating the software? Openly contributing source code? Are users members of the community? I’m not sure if the definition of membership is clear to me.
You’re probably reading this entry on the Perl Ironman Blogging challenge. I joined the challenge over the summer when I had much more time to devote to active participation (no classes). I have failed to leave Paperman status since the semester started.
I haven’t contributed much. I haven’t been able to clean-up and upload my lingering perl projects to CPAN yet. I haven’t contributed to fixing bugs in CPAN modules or perl5 itself. I have flirted with contributing to Rakudo over the last 18 months but have become consumed with my graduate work as of late. I have been to only 1 YAPC::NA event, which was this summer at YAPC::NA 2009.
I don’t write gobs of professional code using Perl; 95% of my professional code is C++. The last professional Perl project was to recreate Test::Harness and TAP::Formatter to meet my needs, which turned out to vary widely. I’m not a sysadmin, so I don’t get to use Perl as a glue to hold my universe together. I don’t have 14 million repuation points for Perl on StackOverflow.com.
I don’t wax philosophically about the Great Divide between Perl 5 and Perl 6 developers; I am both, so that would be weird to argue with myself. I love Perl, both 5 and 6. I love all the great things people have contributed over the many years.
To put it bluntly, my graduate degree greatly eclipses anything I would like to contribute to the open source community, Perl included. I take a few hours a week to run and that’s about all I get for free time.
I did restart DFW.pm, now referred to as Dallas.p6m. Dallas is blessed to have a few significant community members, so I at least try to bring them together for coffee once a month. I’ve held a few mini-hackathons, though attendance has dropped, likely due to the time of the year.
So where would I fit in this Community Ball of Mud?
You’re in the community if you think you’re in the community. :-) Hell, you made a Perl jack-o-lantern! How many CPAN authors can claim that?
Community is a function of passion and interest, not volume of output. So be chill with doing what you have time to do.
You’re in the delicious center of the ball of mud! MMmmmmm. Mud.