Anonymous Monk,
Reposted from my use.perl
blog with a few updates to make it current.
Update: Lest anyone think I posted this for impure reasons, let me explain. Some people have time or money but don't know what to do and this list might give them some ideas. Others might feel that they don't think they could possibly make a meaningful contribution and some of these items on the list show small things like spending your time on someone else can have an impact. Perhaps someone will become inspired to fill out a survey too or just blog about perl. People can do more than they realize.
- I try to perpetuate the culture and enrich the community that attracted me to Perl a little over
6 7 years ago and hasn't let go.
- I spend time working on other people's problems for no other reason than to help
- I have written a CPAN module
- I have written dozens of patches and emailed other authors about improvements to their code
- I have written an article published on perl.com
- I have answered thousands of questions on PerlMonks and an unknown number on IRC
- I have written a half a dozen tutorials on PerlMonks
- I have a Perl related blog
- I hang out on places where new comers go such as PerlMonks and IRC and help them along - often times pointing them to resources
- I attend conferences
- I talk about Perl to anyone who will listen - online or in meatspace
- I am honest when I talk about Perl and I think that is important. It isn't all roses and I don't pretend otherwise.
- In addition to enriching and perpetuating the community, I also support the developement and advances of the language to keep it relavent
- I have contributed a patch to perl 5 (albeit a short doc fix)
- I have filed bug reports
- I fill out surveys when people ask for input on improving things
- I have contributed code to both Parrot and Pugs and to Rakudo via test cases
- I have asked questions on the Perl 6 mailing list
- I have built and tested Parrot on platforms such as Win32/Cygwin and Win32/MinGW which seem to be step children but are important to someone
- I have publicly and privately provided funding to developers to work on the future of perl
- I have donated time, money and code to The Perl Foundation
- I have donated money to PerlMonks
- I am teaching perl for free to those willing to sacrifice their lunch hour
I am not sure what else I would have time to be doing. If you, or anyone else, has an idea of what I could better spend my time on to help I am all ears. I could certainly write articles for perl.com but it would come at the cost of not spending time on PerlMonks or on IRC - I am tapped out of time so changing WHAT I do with that time is the only offer I can make.