[Software-Development] I'm still here

[Paul Visscher]

Bryan Johnson [it_bryan at yahoo.com] said:
> Does anyone ever check the forum?  On the same note,
> does anyone check the list?

The forum I assume is something on http://www.dma.org. No, I never check
the forum. I believe electronic discussion should be something that is
pushed to me, rather than something I have to pull. This mailing list is
perfect for me.

> I know there are 22 other "people" on the list.  Who
> are you?  Why do you not participate?  What keeps
> people you know from joining?  Do you even know you
> still are on the list?

I'm one of the leaders of Dayton.pm, the Perl Mongers SIG. I gave a
presentation to this group a while back on Perl. I don't show up to
meetings for much the same reason as Grant -- Dayton.pm and the Linux
SIG.

Most of the people I know (myself included) don't use Windows, and most
of the people in the group seemed to be Windows programmers (not that
there's anything wrong with that). Additionally, I get my programming
fix from Dayton.pm, I guess.

> How about doing a poll on the boards to allow people
> to show what they work with, are interested in, and
> are disinterested in?  Maybe they are too uninspired
> to type a message, but not enough to take a poll.

I worth mostly with Perl, though bits of C, Python, and PHP creep in
from time to time. Most of the stuff I do is pretty utilitarian, like
needing a Perl script to munge data into some format I need.

I am interested in event driven programming, networking, security, and
functional programming. I'm also interested anonymity systems and
software to facilitate collaboration. I find myself saying I'm
interested in Design Patterns, but I haven't read the DP book I have.
AJAX is interesting, but I can't get over my dislike of JavaScript.

I have been interested in RealTimeBattle
(http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/), which is a programming game
where robots controlled by programs try to destroy each other. It is
language agnostic, but it looks like it doesn't run on Windows.

I'm not really interested in anything that doesn't run on Linux. I
noticed that the meetings (I've been to 2 or 3, I think) sometimes turn
in to "I can't believe how stupid this software is" or "I can't believe
how moronic my coworkers/previous programmers/etc are" and that doesn't
really interest me. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- venting
to people who understand is wonderful, but I get that from the Perl
Mongers and the Linux SIG.

Truthfully, I see a lot of overlap between this SIG, the Perl Mongers,
and the Web Dev SIG. I don't see a good way to unify them, however.

--paulv