Monday, March 9, 2015

The Creator of Perl is Coming to Romania

The Perl Bible I received from one of its co-authors - brian d foy. In 16th of March 2015 it will receive the signature of Larry Wall.

Larry Wall, the God of +Perl, is coming to the third anniversary of +Cluj Perl Mongers and you should come too if you have the possibility.

This is great, because this is the year that Perl 6 will be launched into production and it will become a huge success: imagine the results of 15 years of research and development led by Larry Wall, who already has a proven track record into creating legendary programming languages. Not only that, but Perl 6 will also bring a lot of programming theories to production. Larry Wall himself told in an interview that they "had to design and implement various things that would have earned any number of advanced degrees had we been doing them in academia". So, do your best and come to the event.

If these are not enough reasons for you to come, another one is that +Amalia Aida Pomian is involved in organizing the event. She is a White Camel Awards winner and this is the perfect opportunity for you to see first hand how are the Perl events organized by her.

So, if you haven't done it yet, head on and save yourself a seat. It's free and there's a satisfaction guarantee or money back policy.

Companies, Developer Communities and Open Source Software

The Cluj.PM events are possible because of Evozon. Evozon pays for the conference room, Evozon pays for the schwag, Evozon pays for Larry's and Gloria's (Larry's wife) trip and accommodation to Cluj. It's not a big burn in Evozon's pockets, but, the opportunity cost exists: the owners could have got, for example, a full week holiday in Turkey, or they could bought new laptops or phones, or what not, with the money spent on this event. However, they chose not to do it, they chose to invite Larry Wall here. If you've been to any of the previous Cluj.PM events, you know by now that there is no one to ask for your CV and that there are no presentations about Evozon. It looks like a community event, but paid by Evozon. 
I'd love to see more companies getting involved into local communities, but to help them grow, not to take them over. Unfortunately, the corporate mentality is not there yet - there are companies in Cluj who almost forbid their employees to even take part to these kinds of events, because they're organized by a different company. They're afraid of losing their employees to the organizing company. It's like if they forbid their employees presence to conferences, their employees don't know about the existence of companies like Evozon. 
If you, the reader, are employed in a key position to such a company, then let me tell you something: that is plain dumb. You can't stop a piece of information to reach your employees ears, unless you cut their access to the internet, you lock them in a cell just with a computer to work on and with a bed to sleep. The fact that your employees are with you right now, is because your working conditions are good, the projects they work on are interesting and the money are satisfactory. They're with you because of their own choice not because they don't know about other employers. Please, trust them more and encourage them to take part into community. Heck, even you, as a company, can either organize an event, or be part of organizing the next event. 
I'm employed to Evozon and I'm not writing this post in order to get a raise (although I'd love one). I write it because in the last 3 years not a single developer wrote an article in which to say them a thank you. So Evozon, thank you for spending your resources on organizing Cluj.PM events. I write it, because I think that what Evozon does for the Perl community is too cool not to mention it because it's a corporation. There are more companies that are doing this kind of stuff and it could be even more. 
Booking.com is another example of a cool company that does great stuff for the Perl community. And as a result I think there is no Perl programmer who won't know that they're constantly hiring. cPanel is a constant sponsor of Perl events and the same is true for CraigsList.
To all of these companies and the many more which I didn't mentioned here, a very big thank you from me for the time, money and effort that you put into helping the Open Source communities in general.

Please share the event

If you're a developer in Romania or nearby or if you know people who you think would be interested in seeing a living legend of the programming world, please share this article. 
Because of not being promoted enough, I missed the visit of Richard Stallman in Cluj in 2014. I still regret it and I think it's in every (romanian, bulgarian, ukrainian) programmer best interest to be here.
If you are a programmer passionate about Perl or scripting languages in general, don't miss the event and reserve your seat by signing up on this form.