Today marks the end of my tenth year here in the Monastery, though it's really been five years active, and five mostly wandering through as a visiting alumnus.

Ten years in internet time means that much has changed: 2000 was before Firefox, GMail, Rails, Ubuntu, LCD displays, dual- and quad-core processors, Amazon S3, WordPress, the iPhone, git, jQuery, and a bunch of other stuff that we now take for granted. My laptop at the time was a 33Mhz Dell with 128Mb of RAM; my new desktop has 12Gb of RAM and an SSD. My daughter, then two, now has her own MacBook.

Ten years back, it looked like Microsoft had a solid lock on the world. Now, for many of us, if Microsoft matters at all, it's because our webapps need to support their quirky browers. This is not quite the future I guessed at back then.

I had two objectives when joining PerlMonks. The first was to get better at Perl, which I'd learned largely in isolation without a lot of feedback. PerlMonks helped me level my Perl fu way up, which helped me land a spot at a neat little startup (Airwave Wireless, since acquired by Aruba) doing Test-Driven, OO Perl with a small group of great developers. I've since moved on, but damn, that was fun.

My other objective was to get better at "short form" writing, the one to five paragraph stuff that much of our lives revolve around, using words to question, convince, clarify, record, and generally to help move things forward. Technical skills have a half-life; writing skills do not. Looking back over ten years of posts, I'd like believe that my ability to work with words has improved, though my spelling remains at a B- level. And I'd like to believe that I've helped some people out along the way.

PerlMonks rewards clear writing. Seize that opportunity.

My thanks to those who got PerlMonks going (vroom, wherever he is now), to those who've kept the wheels turning (tye, the janitorial crew, and doubtless people I'm forgetting), the folks here who've taken the time to set me straight when I've needed it (and those who've caught my typos), and to the fine folks at Pair networks who host PerlMonks.

Onward. There's stuff to build.

In reply to A decade in the Monastery by dws

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