Hi everybody,
On Dec 5, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Aaron Trevena wrote:
If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can
provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed - I
found my contact with london.pm introduced to loads of stuff that
would have really helped me at uni, and I suspect most computing
students would find guides on practical programming using perl
(amongst many other things) immensely helpful, and it would help fill
the skills gap of graduates with useful skills rather than
Java-by-whiteboard-and-mouse-click.
I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure how many university
students here in Singapore are interested in or have even heard much
about Perl - there's plenty of excitement in the Ruby, Linux and even
some in the Python communities, and Perl programmers don't seem to get
invited to those sort of parties. But if somebody was just looking for
"a quick way to convert FASTA-formatted files into Malign-formatted
files" and this new wiki had a neat, clean, ten-line script to do
exactly that, we might get more students giving us a try.
Anyway, in the south west of the UK we have 2 perl monger groups and 5
universities, what we could do with is trying to establish a liason at
each uni (in the computer club, comp sci department, bio-informatics,
wherever) and a couple of people in local mongers who will try and to
look at what students are doing, coordinate talks, socials and trips
to workshops.
I'd love to hear how this goes. Singapore.pm is still way too small to
take on these sorts of projects, but there are two major universities
within easy reach; once we've grown a bit, I'll want to try this out
here.
A joined up effort could make it easier, we could share information
about what uni's are using perl and how, and also ideas about what we
could have done with at uni, (If I had Perl Testing Handbook, Perl
Hacks, and the Perl Cookbook in my first year at uni, I'd have kicked
ass, ok, if I had them, and actually read them maybe) - a shared wiki,
both for the mongers and students could help,
Agreed.
and could also make it
easier to hook up graduates or placement students interested in Perl
with employers looking for trainees.
This would be particularly awesome: my current company is a really
small startup, and we use internships to help with all our
development. It would be fantastic to have a way to find college
students already interested in Perl - and for them to find us.
One last question though:
Could really do with a perl.org mailing list to coordinate it - maybe
a global students.pm ?
Why a @perl.org or @pm.org mailing list? Does this tie into your plan
of doing this under the aegis of TPF? We could just as easily start
this as a Google Group or whatever.
And, offtopic:
I'm guessing some you noticed ovid summoned the meme-that-will-not-die
once more on use.perl.
What an absolutely lovely sentence :-).
cheers,
Gaurav
