use Perl

I became a "Just Another Perl Hacker" back in the spring of 1995 when I started messing around with the web. I was a sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Omaha at the time and I wanted to make a national web presence for the fraternity I was in. What started off as a small project snowballed into national recognition and I even spoke at two regional conventions and a international convention in Toronto.

I wormed my way into Ameritrade through my self taught knowledge and worked there full time for 3 years while finishing up my Management of Information Systems Business degree. After I graduated I interviewed for about 3 months and flew all over the country picking and choosing over potential employers. In April of 1999, I started with eData.com (now Seisint) and I work with very talented people and our group in very tight knit.

I went to Perl Whirl looking for a spark and I what I found was my passion. I'm not sure what form it will take. I want to start by setting some goals:

• Get the local Perl Mongers up and running. I tried once before, but I didn't try hard enough :)
• Submit some cool stuff I've done to CPAN. I may just consider it play around stuff, but someone else may find it very useful.
• Attend as many Perl conferences as I can and have a Perl training budget that is separate from my normal savings.
• Follow Perl 6! After Damian's Perl 6 talks and literally watching the language take shape before me, I've really looking forward to what the future holds. :)
• Last but not least, ADVOCATE PERL!

Perl Whirl was great and I actually lost weight even though the food didn't stop coming. I worked out as frequently as I could and Heather made sure we got all the great excursions (a couple really wiped me out).

Thank you Casey for the suggestion to start the journal and hopefully I'll be meeting a lot more cool and interesting people in the Perl Community.

-biz-