20 Years of Perl mongers
It was 20 years ago (almost) that a group of New Yorkers started Perl mongers. I think at the time we were eating something the caterer for The Perl Conference called "California sandwich" that had sprouts and avocado. In 1997, there was a small core of a Perl community that worked on perl, but there was still room for regular user engagement.
I didn't see this coming. While I was in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, Wendy noted that 1997 and 2017 end in the same digit (as does 1967). I don't think we've ever bothered to celebrate an anniversary. I went to check on the date. I registered pm.org on August 22, 1997, which I think makes August 21 the birthday. That was the last day of that conference.
We'll have to do something special guess.
I know that NY.pm will have its anniversary this year, and there my be some other groups. London.pm, when did you start? I think Boston and Seattle was in there very quickly. Who else?
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
London.pm was a little later. Our mailing list got going in something like May 1998 and we had our first meeting on 6th August in the same year.
We made a big thing of our tenth anniversary in 2008. We had a bit of a party at the August meeting and at that year's YAPC and London Perl Workshop I gave a talk entitled "Ye Compleate History Of Ye Perle Mongers Of Olde London Town".
I expect we'll do something similar next year.
But twenty years is a long time. Congratulations to NY.pm.