Still here -- I arrived after reading an interview with Damian Conway on a pair.com newsletter (my web provider) who recommended Perlmonks as a very handy on-line user community. Since I'd been part of a community on CompuServe (the OS/2 forums and the Canopus forum, led by Will Zachmann), I knew that an on-line community was a great way to stay up to date on stuff, and get questions answered. That was over twenty years ago.

I did take Engineering at Waterloo, but the only two programming courses were back in first year Math, when I studied FORTRAN and COBOL. Apart from a few goofy things in BASIC back in high school, the real programming experience I got was on the job at AES Data, writing assembler for a word-processing product. This company partnered with Lanier in the States, but the arrival of the IBM PC in late 1981 destroyed the market for 'just word processing'. My fourth year included a course where I had to complete one assignment in Pascal, so .. I more or less learned that (simple, if you know BASIC and FORTRAN) for the assignment. Then my fourth year thesis was to write a C program .. so bought a copy of K&R in '81 and learned that (simple, once you know a few languages -- and assembler).

Eventually my work experience (C, 6809, 68000 and x86 assembler, and Pascal) led me to writing a lot of one-off programs in C .. which led to awk, and then this weird language called Perl. And that led to the Toronto Perl Mongers, and YAPC, and then here. The language is pretty cool, and the community is weird, diverse and brilliant. I'm not crazy about traveling to conferences, but getting to hang out with all these super bright folks is a wonderful experience.

PS I signed up for a CPAN userid about 20 years ago, and I'm still waiting to upload my first distribution. I'll feel I've truly arrived when I finally cross that item off my list.