The White Camel Awards recognize outstanding, non-technical achievement in Perl. Started in 1999 by Perl mongers and later merged with The Perl Foundation, the awards committee selects three names from a long list of worthy Perl volunteers to recognize hard work in Perl Community, Perl Advocacy, and Perl User…

20 years ago this week, we invented Perl mongers. I've revived the original Perl mongers t-shirt for the occasion, with a tweak to denote the years. It's available only through the Kickstarter and I won't produce it again.

When the moon blocks out the sun in the upcoming sign …

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 …

I've updated the Perl Nerd Merit Badge campaign with a candidate design using the velociraptor from Sebastian's perl-raptor repo. If you want a badge, pledge $8 to the campaign.

If you would like to get such a badge but can't use Crowdtilt, let me know how you'd like to pay and I'll reserve a b…

Somehow I ran across Nerd Merit Badges. They have a cool Stackoverflow badge and an octocat badge. I want a [animal redacted pending permission] Perl nerd merit badge to be part of their line up. We can easily make custom badges, so that's a good place to start.

Pledge to get a Perl Nerd Merit Badge

I've started a ="https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/make-p…

Deven Corzine is revitalizing the Advanced Perl Users group on LinkedIn, and I've volunteered to help. We're going through all of the join requests to approve everything we can, delete the obvious spam and HR requests, and figure out what to do with the rest.

But, besides clearing out the backlog, I want to quadruple the number of members in the group by the end of summer (which is sooner than Christmas). We have 250 members right now. I want that to be 1,000.

LinkedIn is essentially a trust network that relies on connect…

Several people were talking in Twitter about The Perl Review Community Calendar. If your event is missing, the easiest thing is for you to get a commit bit so you can update your event how you like. Either I or Renée Bäcker can give you access, and I think there are other people who can manage sharing. I should set up one of those fancy FAQ things for this.

The Perl Review Community Calendar is for non-recurring or infrequent major events (so, not your monthly …

The Perl community is a great group of people. chromatic and Andy Lester don't think so because they limit their involvement to the most toxic things man has ever created: the mailing list thread and website comments. There's nothing surprising about bad behavior in either of those places and it has nothing to do with Perl. It happens everywhere you find a mailing list or a comment section.

Show up to a Perl event with real people a…