Back in 2024 I took the plunge, and submitted my first ever contribution to that year's "Perl Advent Calendar." For the past few years this has been organized/coordinated by a member of the Toronto Perl Mongers (TPM), Olaf Alders. I wrote about a solution to a challenge I had encountered at my work, and presented it as a great (simple) application of the Perl programming language. But to be honest, I believe any popular scripting language could probably have been used. I was originally a biochemist, carrying out biomedical research in a wet lab, but since retraining as a bioinformatician in 2008, Perl has almost always been the first tool that I reach for when tackling something new. The post dealt with creating phylogenetic trees for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) sequences from patients.
For the 2025 Calendar I had a couple of ideas percolating, but never found the wherewithal or gumption to actually create a new blog post. Instead, I volunteered to be a reviewer for submissions (Olaf had mentioned he could use some extra hands). Mind you, I had almost no idea what would be involved, but I figured I could teach myself.
As you may know, Advent lasts 24 days (perhaps you have enjoyed a conventional, chocolate Advent calendar in the past?) As it turned out, I think I reviewed five articles. In each case I had to teach myself about a CPAN module that the author was writing about. In all of these drafts the subject matter was outside my area of expertise, and also, outside my "comfort zone." In fact, as I mentioned to Olaf, as a sometime reader of articles and posts about Perl, I very likely would have skipped over these same blog posts. Perhaps, if I recognized the author as a prolific and popular Perl author (a celebrity), I might've thought, "I really should come back and read this over if so-and-so is writing about it . . .".
However, as I dove deep into the subject matter, read up on the relevant Perl modules, and learned about the specific "itch" that the code "scratched," I realized that it was like a mini-tutorial on something interesting, and important, that was expanding my horizons (always fun). It was very stimulating (for me), and time well spent (YMMV). In the past I have taught Scientific Writing courses for both undergrads and graduate students, but in most cases I provided very little feedback about the main content, and similarly very little feedback about the code itself. My main goal was to see if I could understand the gist of the post, and then see if I could get their code examples to run as advertised. In some cases this required installing a new Perl module (and all of its dependencies), and in other cases I also needed to install a non-Perl App, etc. These were all good things, AND revealed that I had inadvertently created a so-called "mixed" installation of different Perl versions on my MacBook Pro. Fortunately, my newfound friend, Claude AI, came to the rescue and helped me to diagnose, clear up, and clean up such glitches.
To summarize, I look forward to being an editor (reviewer) for future Perl Advent Calendars (if needed). Since helping with the 2025 Calendar, I suddenly renewed my interest in participating in "The Perl Weekly Challenge", another fun community coding activity. So from my perspective, agreeing to write that first blog post back in 2024 was basically the "gateway drug" that opened the door to learning more Perl-ish things.
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