Almost a year ago, I found a bug (er, inconsistency?) in CGI.pm while working on a project with scrolling lists and optgroups. There was a simple workaround but I submitted a bug report anyway and then sort of forgot about it.
A few weeks ago, MARKSTOS updated the ticket asking for an automated test. This happened to come in on a weekend when I had a little free time so I went ahead and submitted a couple of patches, adding some tests as well as a simple code fix. Well, last week my patches were accepted and I now officially have code in CGI.pm!
This experience has given me a little bump of encouragement to finally start contributing more. Today I got my PAUSE ID. I mostly plan on contributing to existing modules but I wanted to have my ID ready in case I ever write something worth sharing or find a module that needs adopting.
Earlier this week, I was reading through the CHI docs, a module I hope to use soon, and I noticed a couple of minor errors in the POD. I also noticed that the module was on GitHub so I figured why not fork it and fix it!
Much the same for me, my PAUSE ID started off as a placeholder, actually for one small project at work, and then I realized all this stuff I write all day long might as well live in the public domain. Now the CPAN bug reports keep me busy at the weekends
