Know about what the other Perl programmers are doing can be very useful to have a better vision about the use and development with Perl, or to find people that are doing similar things.

I think it would be great if perlmonks started to be more of a coding community (rather than a community for coders). That is, make a section where people can write about their current projects and what-not. We don't need to go all the way to being a sourceforge clone, of course, but I think we could use something more than just writing about your current projects on your home node.
_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

...more of a coding community (rather than a community for coders).

Here here! Japhy has just stated in 11 words what most of my reply to the OP was. I also agree that we need to avoid becoming perlforge. Maybe a good first step would be to create a "My Projects" sections for each among us to post the projects we're working on and invite discussion there.

Peace!
LassiLantar

Well, there are the Code Catacombs which contain a lot of real-life examples of our Craft. What what about the Cats is unsatisfactory to you? (Ooh! Awesome, I think I'm going to go code a virtual cat! /me runs off to post in Cool Uses For Perl. Hehe)

But seriously folks. One thing the OP made me think of was the fact that I'm a very young programmer in general, and I've literally never released anything to the world for general use. I'm in the middle of a project which I intend to put out there, but I really don't know how to push the quality high enough to see the light of day. Basically, I havn't ever had to refine my code beyond the point where it didn't have huge splinters sticking out of it.

So how does this relate to PM? I feel comfortable asking technical questions here. I suppose I will feel comfortable putting my code in harm's way when the time comes. Maybe this isn't the place to learn how to polish code (maybe that's something you can only learn by trying it, failing, and getting corrected). Maybe what I'm driving at is that in the code cats postings I've seen (and to be honest, I havn't read many and I havn't posted any) I've wanted to see more discussion and critique (esp. about design rather than technicalities of code) than debugging and praise. Honestly, this write-up is flawed by the fact that I don't really know that this balance between discussion and technicality is skewed, but when I post my code, I hope to get not only "Look! A giant, man-eating security hole!", but also a discussion of what makes the program useful, not useful, the interface clunky or smooth, etc. Basically I want this to be a place that nurtures the whole programmer - the technical side, the design side, the creative side, the utilitarian side.

If this post is rambling, my apologies. I spent a lot of time trying to whittle it into something thoughtful, but that's not necessarily saying I succeeded. =)

Peace!
LassiLantar

If you ask specifically for discussion and critique, you will usually get some. See Permissions Utility Script for sysadmins - seeking comments for an example.

The difficulty is finding the right sized chunk of code to post: too little and it'll be difficult to criticise the overall design, too much and few people are likely to read enough of the code to give useful comments.

Of course, you can save time by first reading as many threads like the one mentioned above as you can find, and making sure that you have fixed anything that you can learn from them. :)

Hugo

I believe Meditations is just the right place for this kind of discussion. Some people hold that that section is only appropriate for Zen Buddhist navel-gazing things, exceptional demonstrations of grand mastery and deep magick that leave the audience in awe. I suggest they get off their high horse.

If your post has the general form of a query, Seekers of Perl Wisdom might be more appropriate. That section happily accomodates more general, bigger picture questions, if they have anything to do with Perl programming.

You could use your monk profile to describe the projects you're working on. If everyone were to head this section of their profile with the subheading, "Current Projects", then you could even search for it.

I think it is a good idea: A section called My projects.

So only 'you' can 'start' a node under that. You can start with an idea and not necessarily the code. Others can contribute appropriately. It will allow for easy feed back to your ideas and we can learn about practical ideas about everyone's project.

Update:(Aug 4)
Project Zone would be next 'logical step for PM, IMHO. Where we will be more than task oriented and we may not have finalized product to begin with. It would serve a place for many of us before we put them in 'Cool use of perl' or even Sourceforge. Participation wiill be more or less project oriented, rather than task oriented.

I really like the idea of a place where it is possible to throw ideas against the great wall of PM and see what comes back. I don't know if it's best as a public section that people can post into or as a section of each Monk's own perlsonal¹ space. My preference would probably be to have it as a public section that anyone can post into (called "The Project Zone" or something less lame) since that would make it easier to read a number of project/coding ideas and find the ones that interest you.

Peace!
LassiLantar

¹ Would you believe that "perlsonal" was a typo? I'm keeping it because I think it's cool.