or...

How I Learned to Stop Lurking and Love the perlmonks (and actually post something)

or...

Lurkers of perlmonks Unite! You have nothing to lose but your anonymity.

I have been a member of the monastery for two years now, and have not posted once. I have gone from having never heard of Perl two years ago to building an order entry system in object oriented Perl over the last few months (using wxPerl and Class::DBI, both awesome modules).

This is due in a large part to perlmonks and its wonderful occupants (thanks are also due to TheDamian for his excellent book Object Oriented Perl (the one Perl book I own) and the Chapters bookstore chain where I have perused many Perl books I do not own for monetary reasons (ie the lack thereof)).

So I am in the position of having benefited very much from the perlmonks community while not giving very much back. I have tried to be a somewhat active member of perlmonks by voting but I have never posted anything. This was initially due to my lack of knowledge which kept me from trying to answer or respond to any posts and my fear of asking a question that would provoke the dreaded RTFM. As a result I have grown quite adept at using perldoc and searching perlmonks to find the answers to the questions I have had.

One question I could never find an answer to is how best to give back to this community that has helped me grow so much. I am still reluctant to post answers to questions, because I know there are monks that will respond with a more informed and accurate response than I could give (and perhaps chastise me for providing a poor answer). I have realized that it comes down to the fear of being wrong (and/or looking the fool) that has kept me from posting. But this ensures that my growth will stop until I start to challenge what I think I know about Perl (and programming in general) and risk being completely wrong.

So I have a question for any former lurkers out there, how did you go about making the transition to active vocal member of the community?

Finally, a big Thank You to all the members of perlmonks. This community is an excellent source of knowledge, insight, and humour.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt – Voltaire

I want to know if I am a fool, maybe I can do something about it - me

In reply to On Two Years of Silence... by tunaboy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.