Here in the US, it's Thanksgiving, a day of eating lots of food, watching football, and sometimes, just sometimes, expressing gratitude and giving thanks for those things that make life wonderful.
Here are the things I'm grateful for in late 2007, in no particular order after the first.
Google's project hosting service has been a godsend. It's changed the way I do open source projects. It has leapfrogged SourceForge for ease of maintenance, and the bug tracker trumps RT for CPAN that we've been using for so long. Add that to the integration with Google Groups which makes it trivial to create mailing lists, and it's at the tops of my list for 2007. I can't say enough good about it.
Eleven weeks ago, Skud and I started this little website called Perlbuzz as an alternative to the "more traditional outlets" for news in the Perl world. The response has been tremendous. We get 600 RSS readers every day, and have had over 10,000 unique visitors in that time. It makes me happy that our little venture is used and appreciated by the community.
It's been over a year in the making, but the new version of the crucial Test::Harness 3.0 means more flexibility for module authors, and lots of UI improvements for people who just want to run prove and make test.
MJD is so much a fixture in Perl it's easy to forget that he's there. For 2007, though, never mind all the things he's done for Perl in the past, or the hours I've spent being enthralled in talks of his. His Universe Of Discourse blog is the single most intelligent blog out there, and sometimes it just happens to be about Perl.
Was Andy Armstrong always around, or did I just not notice? His time and dedication spent on climbing on board with Ovid and Schwern and the rest of the Test::Harness 3.0 crew has been invaluable in getting it out. Plus, he's a really swell guy anyway.
When I finally despaired of the amount of time and frustration it took to organize content for Chicago.pm's Wheaton meetings, Dave Hoover stepped up and volunteered to take it over. I'm thankful, but not as much as I hope the other Chicago.pm folks are.
I'm all about having the machine keep an eye out for the stupid things we do, and the goodness of Perl::Critic is always impressive. You won't like everything Perl::Critic says about your code, but that's OK. It's an entire framework for enforcing good Perl coding practices.
The Perl community is populated by some tremendous folks. Some names are more known than others, but these people help make daily Perl life better for me. In no particular order, I want to single out Pete Krawczyk, Kent Cowgill, Elliot Shank, Liz Cortell, Jason Crome, Yaakov Sloman, Michael Schwern, Andy Armstrong, Ricardo Signes, Julian Cash, Jim Thomason, chromatic, Chris Dolan, Adam Kennedy, Josh McAdams and of course Kirrily Robert. If you think you should be on this list, you're probably right, and I just forgot.
Because even if she doesn't understand this part of my life, she at least understands its importance to me.
I'd love to hear back from anyone about what they're thankful for. I'm thinking about having a regular Perlbuzz "Love Letters to Perl" column where people write about what they love in Perl.
