Today is my monk day, and coincidentally it's also the same day as my step-son's birthday. Happy 21st, Matt. (No, he's not on Perlmonks yet -- not that I haven't tried.)

So what have I learned after seven years of hanging around here? It can be boiled down to two words: Stay Curious. Keep reading nodes, searching for the topics that interest you; you could even look for nodes written by PM members whose work you admire, and see what they've written lately. Read stuff, learn stuff, ask questions, try stuff. And think. Think lots.

And keep in mind that the whole world isn't composed of Perl -- I spend a fair bit of my time dealing with SQL (and I'm now on my third database, DB2, having spent five years each with MySQL and PostgreSQL). Each database variety has its quirks, but they're interesting to learn.

Perl really is fun -- I don't discover something new and cool every day, or even every week, but fairly often I come across something and I think "What a cool language this is." One recent discovery a was Tie::File, a relatively innocuous little module, but unbelievably useful to me when I needed to handle a file like an array. All of the opening, reading, writing and closing that I thought I'd left behind with C was done for me. Amazing.

Yesterday I wanted to tidy up some bug big chunks of SQL, so after a bit of Google searching I ended up right back here at Perlmonks, looking at a node about SQL::Tidy. I spent the next two hours commenting the code and tweaking it a little so the SQL Iwas giving it would be formatted the way my brain wants to see it. The code's not done yet, and in the process I've discovered yet another useful module -- SQL::Tokenizer. Very cool.

Back in 2001, I wasn't really sure how long I'd stick around Perlmonks, but since Damian Conway had recommended the site, I figured I should give it a try. Good thing I hung around -- staying current at PM has been like doing a post-graduate degree in Computer Science online. (Best part: no closed book exams!)

Thanks to all of you for your questions, your answers, your comments and for hanging out here at Perlmonks. Perl and CPAN may be terrific tools, but without the community support behind them, it just wouldn't be the same language.

And Stay Curious!

Updated Typo: bug -> big. Thanks jdporter. :)