I'm what you'd call an "accidental programmer". I'm an accountant by training who learned some SQL around 1997 so I could get my data faster and stop lining up at our guru's desk. I found the fetching of the data more interesting than the subsequent accounting, so I eventually left my company's Finance department for a reporting job in Customer Service.

At one point I had the opportunity to learn some web app development to deploy some reports to our intranet. I have some freedom as far as languages and platforms, so I started out with ASP (I knew a little VB, just like a script kiddie), and shortly thereafter discovered open source and ported my app to PHP.

Cut to early 2002, and I'm on a learning spree. I had heard of Perl years before, when the web was taking off, but now something told me it was something I should add to my arsenal, so I decided to pick up Perl. I figured "I'm a pretty smart guy", so went straight to the Camel book. (I struggled with that a little, and, looking at the Llama a couple years later, realized I should have just started there instead of trying to read ahead.) Still, I picked up enough to become dangerous, and wished I had learned it about five years earlier, where it would have made my data-munging and database-interface tasks much easier.

So now it's 3 1/2 years later, and I'm no wizard, but I've written ever-improving codebases for our department's web apps (reading some of my own early code makes my eyes itch), and lots of command-line data-munging tools, some dealing with millions of customer records per day. I've picked up working knowledge of some other languages (C, Java and recently some Ruby), but I always come back to Perl because I like its expressiveness and the way it gives you enough freedom to do things a different--and interesting--way (or enough rope to hang yourself with--you decide). I also have a decent sense of what CPAN module to use for a particular task--something that's way more important than newcomers think it is.

One of Perl's strengths is its sometimes dysfunctional, usually helpful, always interesting community, and after three years I'm starting to get more involved. I've been to four OSCONS and one YAPC. (I remember about three months after starting to pick up Perl, sitting in TheDamian and TimToady's Perl 6 talk at OSCON 2002, with my head spinning. I was pretty much just picking up bits of knowledge off the ground at that convention.) I've learned a lot at these, but never got to know many folks or participate in the "hallway track". At this year's YAPC::NA, petdance expressed the "there are no nobodies in the Perl community" sentiment, following it up with an OSCON lightning talk, and he's right. I've been in in the monastery for a while--and learned a lot--but it was read-only for most of that time. I've recently decided to chuck the vow of silence.