Mayukh

My first post on blogs.perl, here goes.

This is a short narrative of how I 'discovered' Perl and why I have stuck with it for the last three years.

Back in October 2007, I had recently joined a financial services firm as a fresh graduate. During a meeting of the corporate charity committee it was suggested that a website should be created to set up a charity auction. In an impulsive moment I went ahead and raised my hand. The key motivation was the sense of satisfaction that always accompanies voluntary work. The fact that the chairperson of the charity committee was a very pretty lady whom I was keen to impress may or may not have something to do with my decision.

A little about my background. At that time I had dabbled a bit with different programming languages. I had modified a perl script here and there but had not written a complete application from scratch, let alone a website.

I came home from work, sat down at my desk with my laptop at 8pm, by 4 am I had a working website with product catalogue and basic bidding system. This was remarkable!

I agree, I am not in any way proud of the code I had written three years earlier however I was amazed how much utility I was able to generate, an entire working website from a cold start, taking into account my only very vague familiarity with the language. At this point I was sold. I later read many of Larry Wall's speeches and have come to appreciate the philosophy underlying Perl. It allowed me to do something useful, agreed not the most elegant solution but the important thing remains that I had something of use to show for my 8 hours.

I began my education in Perl in full earnest from the very next day. In the next three years I have written over half a dozen web applications(mostly on weekends) which are used by internal employees in over four countries.

There have been some key moments in this exercise which have led to drastic changes in the way I approach Perl programming. With each application I learned something.

• Application 2 : Discovered "CGI::Application", A big step from my first perl script with print statements scattered about, yuck!


• Application 3: Test::More, testing is cool!


• Application 4: Rose DB Object, Object relational mapping


• Application 6: Moose!

I have rambled on enough, I continue on my journey and there is so much more to learn.

PS: It so happens that I impressed the chairperson of the Charity Committee who is now my girlfriend for three years.