Re: 2024 Golden PERL Award voting ends 6/27 4PM PDT

[cavac]

The list seems mostly people who are doing a lot of work in the public. I voted "other" for our beloved Sullivan Beck (SBECK) for tirelessly maintaining Date::Manip.

It's not "glorious" work that will get you on the front page of a newspaper. But it's the kind of work that is necessary for a programming language, it's neverending and it affects a lot of production critical code paths (so errors are not an option).

A lot of this kind of work goes on "behind the scenes" for every programming language. I think it's important that we, as a community, show our appreciation not only to the publicly visible people. You know the ones that pop up in news items and at the top of release notes. We should give our thanks and our support for the people who single-handedly maintain critical parts of our unseed infrastructure.

I only had one vote to give, but there are at least three similar dozen maintainers of irreplacable code i could list in a couple of hours just by looking at my own softwares dependency graphs.

[Anonymous Monk]

I love this idea and think Sullivan Beck deserves a White Camel for that work. I know when calls for that come around, they're on my list, as well as anyone else who has those kinds of jobs. Recognition like that is definitely and supremely overlooked but so deserved. I think people with that amount of unrecognized work deserve recognition with more gravitas and consensus around why they are deserving.

For an award like this, I would like to campaign for myself. I've never programmed Perl; I've helped coordinate and Run numerous Perl Conferences, including two YAPC/ TPRC. As a more flashy front of the news but no substance person inside the community, I think an award like this that is fraught with drama and confusion as to its intended meaning should go to someone who also has been caught in some drama and has a vague connection to the Perl Community.

I know self campaigning is uncouth, but those are my thoughts on how best to use this award.

Trog
Mark Prather