purplecat

I've been volunteering, on and off, as a DreamWidth developer for about eighteen months - ever since I saw a post saying how easy DW was to volunteer for compared to other Open Source projects. I had the advantage, of course, of having programmed in Perl before, and some experience finding my way around other people's code bases. On the other hand, I've never worked on a project with a large team, let alone one that expected to put comparatively polished pieces of code out into an actual live production environment (academia, with a few notable exceptions, very much takes the view that code development ends at the point where you upload a prototype and say "feel free to use it if you're interested" or even, "it worked once, on my machine, which totally means it counts as a scientific result". User support generally ends somewhere around that point as well.)

Since DreamWidth takes its volunteers very seriously, they offered to pay (at least in part) for any volunteer who had submitted a patch in the last year, to go to a Perl Programming tech conference in Texas. YAPC::NA, to be precise. In a piece of classic programmer humour, that stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference: North America" - which is not a joke that is worth explaining.

( Git for Ages 4 and Up )

( YAPC Itself )

( Bats )

( Visiting the Servers )

I have them, many, many of them. If anyone wants one feel free to ask.