I'm still around. I've been lurking on PM since about 2004 or 2005, but only made an account in 2011.

In 2001 in Berlin, the Chaos Computer Club installed "Project Blinkenlights", an interactive light/art installation. At the Chaos Congress the next year (2002), some people (including me) started to work on projects that allowed playing those animations on the small scale, e.g. without having a soviet-era ministry building at our disposal.

I wrote a "small" command line player in C, which was my language of choice in those days. My best friend saw my code, shook his head, rewrote the thing in like 10 lines of a programming language named "Perl" which i haven't heard of before. I was hooked immediately.

Now, over a two decades laters, i'm still writing open source and commercial software in Perl. Yes, i do some small stuff in C. And, as a web developer, i'm also busy (and getting paid for) cursing at the stupidity that is JavaScript. But it's mostly Perl, a lot of the frontend stuff is done by my younger (and often temporary) collegues these days.

I can't say i ever claimed to be "not a programmer". As i've said before in PerlMonks - my haven of calmness and sanity, talking to computers is somewhat build-in into my brain (whereas talking to people is more of an optional module that never left the beta test stage).

As for "still around", yes, i'm here. And it seems i'm here to stay. You see, more than once i made the too common mistake of answering a questions about the Monastery with "oh, that could be easily fixed with..." and suddenly getting a new user permission and a short message along the lines "You are now allowed to fix it" ;-)

Once there was the discussion on how some links in PM were processed wrong, i unwisely opened my mouth to analyze the problem and suggest solutions... only to discover the next day i was suddenly a member of pmdev. Another time, i was sad to read that Tanktalus was stopping support for last hour of cb and, without any deep thoughts about the responsibility, offered to take over that service and invent chatterbot. But truth be told, all that stuff turned out to be fun learning experiences that brought me closer to this incredible community than just merely answering questions in SoPW ever could.

It's been a wild and fantastic ride so far for me. And it seems, at least on how little we humans can predict the future, there is a lot more to come.