Alberto Simões

For some time now, I am a Dancer contributor. It all started in the last Christmas (everything in the Perl community start or end at Christmas time), with Dancer Advent Calendar.

Getting a little behind... I tried to learn to use Catalyst some time ago, reading a Packt Publishing book and found at that time that the book was already outdated. Unfortunately that is standard in Technology, and the books that keep up to date for some time are the ones that focus the foundations of computer science, and not the technology itself. It didn't work. Probably I was not tuned to the MVC model, or I didn't have a concrete project where to test Catalyst.

Time passed, and I needed to put a website up. CGI was not an option. I do not think CGI is that bad, but if web frameworks exist, is because they lessen the work needed to make a website run. At that time I was pointing to Mojolicious, as I listened to a talk on a Portuguese Perl Workshop, and it seemed easier to learn than Catalyst. When I finally decided to learn a web framework I found that Dancer Advent Calendar, read the first two or three days (can't remember exactly) and I liked it.

I started to build a web site with it, and it felt good. With little effort I got the basics working. Of course problems arise, and I needed to visit #dancer on irc.perl.org for help. The users present on that channel at the time tried to help me. I confess they didn't find the solution, as it was some weird problem on redirects and the fact that I needed to use Open3. That was the time when I needed to develop POSIX::Open3.

But since them, I was hanging on #dancer. Listening to development discussion and newbies asking for help. I tried to help them as good as I could. Sometimes I needed to hack Dancer code to correct some bug or add a functionality requested by one of those newbies. And no, I wasn't a Dancer developer then. Just trying to help.

Accordingly with the Changelog, my first patches were released in Dancer 1.3001. I do not want to search on GitHub the exact date for my first pull request, but this release was out in January/February 2011. That is, only one or two months after I started using Dancer.

The pull requests continue to pop in github. And I can be a hassle, poking the developers to merge my code :) About eleven releases after (a quick count, didn't take care of what were stable or developer releases), Dancer developers started to name stable releases with names of somebody that helped/contributed a lot to that release. The first release of this kind was named after Michael Schwern, and the next was released after my name (1.3030, April 13th). About four months after I started using Dancer.

As I did not stop to write code, fixing bugs and adding some new features, they made me a Dancer core developer in May 9th.

I continue to help (I think) in the development of Dancer. And it all started with a simple site I needed to put online.

As a final note, my thanks to Alexis Sukrieh, Damien Krotkine, David Precious, Franck Cuny and Sawyer X for putting up with me and for welcoming me to this community.