Mohammad S Anwar

Inspired by the blog by Gabor Szabo, I am writing this blog to thank all the supporters on Patreon. I would also like to thank Gabor Szabo for the support and guidance. I wouldn't have come this far without your support.

I still can't believe there are people out there willing to support me. Although I knew about Patreon but never had the courage to go public.

I remember my first contribution Test::Excel to CPAN was uploaded on 13th Aug 2010. The second came within 2 months, on 25th Oct 2010, Map::Tube. These 2 are still very close to me out of 85 contributions to CPAN till date. As of today, there 39 maps created using the library by fellow contributors. You can find them on Meta CPAN under the namespace Map::Tube::*.

Looking at the CPAN author page, I find some very useful distributions that I adopted in the past e.g. PDF::Create, XML::XPath and SVG.

I fondly remember The CPAN Pull Request Challenge started by Neil Bowers in January 2015. I was looking for something to give back the community. This gave me ideal way to contribute. I stick to the challenge till its end in December 2018. The best part of it, was I never missed a month in the 4 years of its life.

I also joined Hacktoberfest Challenge in October 2015. Since then I have not missed once. Last year, I had the best time of my life, I contributed 160 Pull Request in the month of October.

I was introduced to 24 Pull Request by Neil Bowers in the year 2015. Again, I have been participating ever since without missing a year. The best year was 2018, when I contributed 125 pull requests in the 24 days of December.

The year 2015 was the best year for me, I built my personal website using Dancer2 and Bootstrap. It has been hosted on a tiny Raspberry Pi, sitting in the corner of my bedroom. Building website taught me a lot about front end presentation. Bootstrap helped me build responsive site. You will find plenty of interesting charts showing my progress over the period.

I gave my first video interview to Gabor Szabo on 25th September 2016 as a part of the CMOS series. Ever since I followed Gabor and his widely populate Perl Weekly newsletter.

Did I ever dream of editing the very same newsletter one day?

In May 2018, I formally joined the team of editors and released the first edition. As of today, I have edited 57 issues in little over 2 years.

The year 2019, brought a big changes in my life when I started Perl Weekly Challenge, an opensource hosted as GitHub pages. Sometimes, I refer to it as "The Weekly Challenge" to reflect the fact it is not just Perl but also Raku part of the weekly challenge.

Since the start "The Weekly Challenge", I find it increasingly hard to do anything else. However in the journey so far, I have had plenty of helping hands with it. This gave me some time to start YouTube Channel. I have so far shared my live coding session working on weekly challenges. It has been received very well so far. Thanks to each and every subscriber of the channel.

The last project that I have started was the monthly series of interviews for Perl.com, so far, I have got two interviews done, first with Gabor Szabo followed by Curtis 'Ovid' Poe.

Now what next?

I will keep you all posted with the progress.