scenius

Profile - Deb Bassett

Deb Bassett is a freelance Rails developer based in Otley in West Yorkshire. She is a mainstay of the Leeds tech scene and the organiser of the Leeds GeekUp. I interviewed her the day after the inaugural Geek-Up in Leeds, and a couple of weeks before her marriage to Rob Lee, who is also an Otley-based developer.

CS: What’s your background?

DB: I’m originally from Stone in Staffordshire. I did a University degree at Manchester in Computer Science – I had applied to study Physics but I changed my mind at the last minute after realising my forte was computers! After finishing my degree, I moved to Leeds for my first job, as a software engineer for PA New Media, which became Ananova (remember - “the world's first virtual newscaster”?) and was eventually bought by Orange. I was with them for three years, mainly developing in Perl, with some Java and PHP in between. I then went to work for Energis, which is now Cable & Wireless, as a full-time Perl and Java developer. After 4 years there, I left and went travelling for 10 months with Rob, and we have both freelanced thereafter.

Things moved on while I was travelling, and I picked up Ruby/ Ruby on Rails when I got back – this time I had the choice of where to take my career and Rails seemed to have everything I wanted in a framework.

The Rails community has grown substantially since I first started, and are such an enthusiastic bunch of people. The amount of Rails applications in production has increased substantially too since I started and is steadily creeping into the mainstream.

CS: How do you find working from home, when there’s two of you doing it, and your personal life is there as well?

DB: It’s really good, I enjoy it! Sometimes it can be difficult to separate home and working life when there’s no clear boundaries for when you should start and stop working. You sometimes find yourself working the whole day and into the evening until quite late, and sometimes your cycles move round so, for example, you might work from 12 noon until 4 in the morning: it doesn’t really matter when you’re working from home what times you work. But there’s two of us, and it’s actually very nice to have the support – I don’t think I’d like it if I was on my own.

Otley’s a great place to work from - it's a small town in the countryside just north of Leeds and we’re lucky enough to have some good friends there. There's quite a tech community which mainly stems from my ex-employers Energis (Cable & Wireless) and Orange – most of us have worked at one or the other at some point and we are techie to varying degrees.

I occasionally head over to York to see Edd who I work with on his exciting start-up, Expectnation.

CS: How long has GeekUp being going on in Manchester?

DB: I believe it started about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. It is the brain child of Andrew Disley, a web developer from Orrell, near Wigan. I first found out about it at Reboot in May last year where I met Andrew, and it had already been going a good while then.

CS: And at what point did you think you could do one of those in Leeds?

It’s an hour and a half from Otley to Manchester and we’ve done the journey quite a few times now. It seemed a natural progression for Leeds to have a GeekUp, a bit closer to home – we had talked about it a few months before with Andrew and others but we were a bit tied up because Rob and I were getting married (they got married in July - ed) so we said we'd leave it until after then. We had underestimated how vibrant the Leeds tech scene was, and by May lots of people were asking about Leeds GeekUp, so Andrew asked us if we could start it a bit earlier, so we kicked things off in June.

CS: Andrew seems to be an Agent Provocateur …

DB: I like to call him the father of GeekUp, although I'm not sure he'd like me saying that! He’s a nice guy I don’t think it would have the GeekUp edge without him.

CS: While I think it’s great there are User Groups for Linux, Perl etc, I think it’s important that GeekUp is not just about one technology. If someone is setting up a Start-Up, they need to be able to program, to need to be able to sell themselves, so there’s marketing skills involved, they need to be able to set up a website so there’s web design, there’s the money side of things …

DB: GeekUp is great because you get to meet a mix of people from the industry who you wouldn't necessarily normally meet. For example, I get to meet programmers fairly often, but, say, designers - I’m not really a designer so getting the opportunity to meet others from that community is invaluable. Also, if you are a freelancer, working from home, GeekUp provides that important connection to the community that you might otherwise get from a work environment. I end up picking up lots of sound-bites of information, and reading about them in depth later... it's an efficient, effective way of catching up with the community.

CS: So last night was just conversation?

DB: Pure conversation.

We’re hoping to have talks next time, we haven’t quite decided on the format, maybe 20:20 Lightning Talks. The Manchester GeekUp last month did 5 quick sessions, and people could talk about anything techie. It’s nice to have that mixture of socialising and formal talks.

CS: I think it’s important to leave spaces at these events so people can have a gab.

DB: Yes, It's a well known fact that the best conversations happen in the hallways at conferences, we think that GeekUp can learn from this.

CS: It’s a way of people getting excited about what’s going on. There’s a real buzz these days.

DB: There’s a complete buzz at the moment - it’s fascinating. Although it worries me a bit, I'm hoping it doesn't match in behaviour to the original dot-com boom.

CS: So how many people turned up last night?

DB: More than 40! Initially we were expecting around 10 people as we didn't realise the Leeds tech community was so big so we were really pleased!

CS: And beside the Rails guys you were with, who else came along last night?

DB: There were lots of web developers and designers plus a few from PR and marketing and some bloggers and entrepreneurs.

CS: How many people knew each other?

DB: I knew quite a few people, as I’d got in touch with them and invited them along, but there were lots who I didn't know - groups of people from certain companies that came together and then there were individuals who just turned up and mingled, so it was a complete mix. It was great to see lots of people from the Round Foundry Media Centre too - I’d never met any of them before.

CS: Did everyone volunteer to come again?

DB: We had lots of positive feedback, there was even talk of a barbecue next time.

CS: There seemed to be lots of people writing on Upcoming how they were pleased this was happening in Leeds. Has there been anything happening in Leeds like this up until now?

DB: WYLUG has been around for some time now and there's been quite a few flickr and blogger meetups. More recently OpenCoffee has started in Leeds - the first one was last week. It’s during the day so hard for me to get to, but they had a really positive turnout with 30+ people turning up in Starbucks (I think next month they are changing the venue). There’s going to be a BarCamp Leeds very soon, they haven’t set a date yet, but it could be late September or October, it's a really positive step for Leeds. Just last month there was a Barcamp Sheffield. It's really great to see so much happening up north.

There's also going to be an Open Street Map mapping party in Leeds on 15^th & 16^th September. The organiser, a guy called Tim Waters was at GeekUp last night. Leeds isn’t very well mapped, although it's getting better: I went to the Sheffield Mapping Party and I’m really pleased we're having one in Leeds as it'd be great to see more of Leeds on the map.

CS: They were a courier company at first, weren’t they, using GPS to keep track of where their couriers were?

DB: They used a courier company to get lots of the initial GPS traces. It’s really fascinating: have you seen the animations of the OSM coverage growing in London and the UK? It really excites me, over the last year I’ve been following it, I've watched the maps grow rapidly in coverage, the mapping completed by regular, open source-minded people.

CS: How far a-field did people come from last night?

DB: Some people came from over 30 miles away including some of the Manchester GeekUp lot. Andrew didn’t make it – he really wanted to but he’ll be there next time. I'd love to see Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester have a combined GeekUp gathering one time, it would be great to get everyone together.

CS: So when’s the next GeekUp Leeds?

DB: GeekUp Leeds is every third Wednesday of the month. Manchester is the second Tuesday of the month and Liverpool in on the last Thursday!

CS: That’s quite an algorithm to work out!

DB: There’s method there somewhere. One thing I noticed was that there seemed to be less Mac users than I expected. Every time I go to a conference there’s whole mass of Mac users. There seemed to be a mix of Windows, Linux and Mac users.

CS: Are you a Mac User?

DB: Linux. Ubuntu.

CS: And is it going to be a geeky marriage, if you don’t mind me asking?

DB: Quite! We are using moo cards for the place names, Rob’s generated everyone’s name using images of the letters from flickr using the same principle as flickr spelling. I wrote a guest management system for the wedding in Rails, too. We also are planning on having a wii room at the evening do.

CS: Weddings are well served by the internet.

DB: There's certainly lots of wedding-related content out there, it's a vast market! People used to put disposable cameras on the tables, but now there’s no need, you can tell everyone to upload their photos to Flickr and tag them with a specified tag. That way, everyone gets to see everyone else’s photos. Our gift list is online, too - we are using kaboodle (didn't get chance to write our own!) – so that we could list gifts from different places and not be tied to a specific store.

CS: Do you mind if I ask about women geeks? Someone was saying that Hack Day was predominantly male, and I wondered if you see things changing and what would make things change.

DB: I don’t see things changing that much, which is a shame as it's a really interesting and creative industry to work in. I do find it a difficult question to answer as it seemed a natural progression for me to head into computing and I have found the computing industry really welcoming as a whole.

Of course, you are aware that you are a minority, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. Jeni Tennison has written a fabulous article which is the first article I've read that really hits the nail on the head for me: Getting Women into Computing. Edd wrote a follow-up to Jeni's article - of particular interest to me is the point made about self-efficacy - as Edd says, a complete revelation, and something I've never quite been able to put into words.

CS: Are there any other interesting events in the North that you go to, and further a-field?

DB: Rob and I head down to Manchester as often as possible for North West Ruby User Group, run by Dave Verwer. There's also a group in York called We Are The Monkeys - they've been going for some time now and meet on a monthly-ish basis. In July, Manchester will host "The State of the Map" - the first Open Street Map international conference (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/153405/). Unfortunately it's on the same day as our wedding otherwise I'd be there! Also in Manchester is rumour of a Barcamp – I'm looking forward to hearing more about that.

Further a-field, we headed down to Interesting 2007 in London where we manned a stall for folksy, the start-up that Rob has been working on with a guy called James Boardwell. Folksy is an online market place to enable crafters to sell their stuff but with a social, Instructables slant. I helped them with their stall where we showed off our hardware hacking and crafting skills, which went down really well. It was cool to see people making stuff in person at an event, it doesn’t normally happen. There seems to be a movement towards making and crafting at the moment, it's great to see people getting out their soldering irons and sewing machines and innovating again.

In May, we were lucky enough to head over to Paris for XTech, chaired by Edd Dumbill, the theme this year being “The Ubiquitous Web”.

In May, we also travelled to Copenhagen for Reboot, 'a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us', and last September we were at RailsConf Europe, in London.

CS: What are the major employment opportunities in Leeds for a techie? What kind of work is it? How do you find freelancing? Is it a good place to be a start-up?

DB: There are fairly good employment opportunities in Leeds covering a wide range of skills. Larger companies such as Cable and Wireless, Orange, William Hill, HSBC and the Halifax have a large IT presence here and there are also many web design and development agencies too.

In terms of freelance/contract opportunities, I've not seen many advertised Rails positions, however the more mainstream skills are well represented. I've normally found that freelance work comes via word-of-mouth and it matters less where it is based as you generally work from home.

In terms of being a good place to be a start-up - I don't think Leeds is any different to any other major UK city – nowadays I think it matters less where you are based, as long as you are close to major transport links, and have good connectivity!

CS: Are there major tech events in Leeds or and how do they impact on the daily techosphere?

I'm sorry to say I can't think of any major tech events in Leeds other than the impending BarCamp. Maybe that's something that GeekUp can help resolve!

CS: Who are the major bloggers and characters?

DB: The major characters and bloggers that I know of in the Leeds area are: Tim Waters, geo-specialist and developer, Edd Dumbill, writer, programmer, entrepreneur and free software advocate, Imran Ali, emerging technologies specialist and organiser of Leeds Open Coffee and not forgetting Rob Lee, fiancé, developer and entrepreneur!

Profile - The Pioneering Steve Bowbrick

UK-based Steve Bowbrick has been involved with the web since its early years, (as we know, Internet years are like dog years - you have to multiply them by seven to compare them to human years - which means Steve has been around the Internet since it was a small puppy!) He has broken new ground in a host of projects, notching up a World's First and at least one UK's First, and he shows no signs of stopping. He kindly agreed to expose himself to the full force of the harrowing GMT Scenius interview assault, and survived to tell the tale, (photo courtesy of Steve himself):

How did you start out on the road to being a techie? What language did you first learn to program in? What computer did you use? Did you code in isolation or was there a group of friends egging each other on? What resources did you have back then?

I have always been and will probably always remain a wannabe techie. I can't program, can't drive a command line and can't write valid XHTML! I developed a fascination with technology when I discovered a roomful of newly delivered Apple Macs at The Polytechnic of Central London in 1984. I went on to make my degree show using the computers and was very nearly failed for producing no photographs (this being a photography degree).

I belong to the wrong generation as far as computers are concerned. There were no computers at my school and the ZX81/BBC micro etc. hadn't been invented. So I'm a late developer.

I taught myself everything I know about computers by fiddling with my Mac and reading the quite amazing (and now defunct) Byte Magazine.

For me, computer technology represented a foreign language, exciting and exotic but utterly inaccessible to me. I'm an outsider looking in.

Where do you work now and what do you do there?

I'm spending a while with a really interesting UK manufacturer called King of Shaves which is a really cool (and slightly geeky) shave brand that I've been using for years. I'm interim Head of Digital for the firm, which means I've got a desk here but only for a few months probably. While I'm here I'll reset the company's digital strategy and revamp the http://shave.com ecommerce platform.

What I like about the firm is the focus on the product and on innovation: they're number 2 to Gillette in the UK and in other markets with almost no ad spend. They innovate three times as quickly as the big firms and they're really passionate about the product - they remind me of a web startup. This makes it exciting to interact with the people here and to invent new stuff.

Back in 1993, you worked as the editor of 3W. What was 3W and what was significant about it? How was it received at the time? How did you get the job? How did it all end?

3W (which was Ivan Pope's baby) was the first print magazine anywhere in the world about the web. In the mag's first issue there was a little box-out that said something like: "there are already hundreds of web sites". Holy shit. That was a fascinating time. Naturally enough, I met Ivan in a pub at some kind of net meetup.

3W was received with suspicion by the trade: distribution was difficult. Nobody knew where to put it! The readers loved it, though. I think what was most fascinating was the geographic spread of subscribers: we had readers in literally dozens of countries and the magazine was routinely censored by authoritarian regimes - they didn't want their people learning about this new, impossible-to-control information source.

The web killed 3W (maybe we were the web's first old media victim!). It just seemed crazy to be squeezing ink onto dried wood pulp with the web breathing down our necks. Also, issue 4 had a four-colour cover which I seem to remember practically bankrupted us!

Tell us about Webmedia: what work did you do there? Who did you work with? How different was web design back then?

Webmedia was the logical extension of 3W. The clue is in the name: In 93 and 94 we were going round telling people the web was a medium, not just a networking technology or an application (which was a pretty difficult point to make in those days - it was like saying your toaster is going to evolve into a new medium. People laughed).

I maintain that Webmedia's success (which was considerable in the early days, before we went bust!) was essentially down to our ignorance of business norms. I simply had no idea that two blokes in a basement weren't supposed to phone Lloyds Bank's Marketing Director or tell people we were going to transform their multi-billion pound businesses. So we just got on with it. It was a riot.

I was the sales guy - the communicator - and Ivan was the brooding presence. Then after a while Ivan kicked off a domain name registry called Netnames and the two businesses parted, which was all a bit painful and costly and led to Webmedia's collapse in 1998. There was a history of the period written a few years later and the author says: "Steve Bowbrick: such a pioneer he went bust before the boom".

At this time there were no systems, no norms, only a handful of standards: we built everything ad hoc right on top of the bare metal. Ivan and I both wrote HTML in the early days - which is sort of scary. We had a brilliant hacker called Steve Hebditch who wrote a web server for us - pre-Netscape, pre-Apache, pre-Java, pre- everything. When we started to build sites HTML supported pictures but not backgrounds. I remember the celebrations when a version of Mosaic came out that allowed a background gif: we went crazy.

I built the firm up to 65 staff, three offices, some very large and demanding corporate clients: consumer brands mostly. We built the first public sites for many major brands. Many of the people we hired went on to seed Web 2.0. I'm quite proud of all that. It was a shambles but it was the beginning.

After Webmedia, you set up Another.com: can you describe why it was special? It's just going through another revamp: what made it last, when other enterprises faded?

another.com was a glorious near-triumph. A creature of the boom built around the idea of personalisation. I still believe passionately that the premise was correct: identity is so important online but people don't want IDs handed out by faceless corporations: they want to create their own and they want control of their use. At another.com we registered tens of thousands of domain names and allowed users to create dozens of email addresses using them: addresses all mapped onto a single inbox and users had total control over addresses, filtering etc. etc. It was a very powerful idea.

The first problem for us was the crash. As NASDAQ bombed we were just getting to the end of our first round of capital ($10M from Eden Ventures and others). Raising new capital for a start-up like ours became impossible so we did the unthinkable and switched off the free service: dumping nearly two million users overnight. Blimey. It was the ultimate shock therapy, though, and the business survived and is now a profitable division of an ISP.

The second problem was down to me: my judgement was that the end of the free era was coming: that the giant, boom-era ad-funded dot.coms would soon be history, replaced by a leaner breed of paid-for services in a more economically rational environment. I was, of course, totally wrong! The final proof of my error came a couple of years later when Google launched GMail, a service offering an effectively unlimited service for nothing.

These things go in cycles but it seems pretty clear now that the economics of the next phase of the mainstream web are now in place: free services driven by ads and freemium deals.

You've toughed out some comparatively lean years since the dotcom boom: how hard was it to find work? Did you have to slum it and do less appealing work? Are things better now? What projects are you working on? Is there a division between your projects that are public and your projects that are personal? What project are you most proud of?

I don't remember doing anything unappealing! Things were hard on occasion, though - but that was mostly about having three kids in the thick of it, I think! Web 2.0 has changed everything of course. It's the fulfilment of our earliest dreams for the web. What I remember loving about Tim Berners-Lee's vision in the early nineties was that the www, for him, was a *read-write* medium. Remember, TBL's first browser (the one he developed for his colleagues at CERN) had an editor *built-in*.

It was taken for granted in the early days that we'd be authoring pages as well as just reading them. I think one of the most politically important decisions of the early web was Marc Andreesen's when he decided to take the editor out of Mosaic. A huge retrograde step that hardly anyone remembers.

Non-work projects now mostly centre on my blog http://bowblog.com, which I'm having rebuilt now by a clever American called Matt McInerney http://pixelspread.com, a couple of little twitter-based projects like http://twitter.com/lwb and I'm doing something radio-related with the esteemed Russell Davies http://www.russelldavies.co.uk.

Could you describe the work you do with Thinking Ethics? How is your choice of software informed by your politics? Is there any software you wouldn't use for political reasons? Are there particular licenses or software models that you favour?

Thinking Ethics is not such a big thing for me now - I'm a very occasional contributor to the blog. It's a great blog about business ethics that came out of an extraordinary event organised in Geneva by Beth Krasna. She put together the most ecumenical crowd I've ever met: from Generals and development workers to TV producers and priests - to discuss the future of ethics. The output was a book, which is absolutely fascinating. Beth went on to commission a comic book version of the book too, which is amazing.

Open Source, the GPL, CC and the whole flowering of open culture have inspired me for a long time. I was a fan of UNIX and hacking and Stallman and the all the rest before the web existed. I wrote about code in my undergraduate thesis in 1988 (for a photography degree!). I'm not religious about it, though. There's a lot of unhelpful, blind dogma out there. Geeks are a phenomenally bright and motivated group but they can be autistic about politics and history and society. They can miss the bigger picture (I guess Stallman's a pretty good example of that tendency!).

Think about the economic value that Microsoft has created over the decades. Think about the mark on history that the X86-PCM-DOS-Windows nexus will leave: the historical equivalent of being visible from space. Having said that, my desktop is *almost* MS-free: I still rely on Excel but I use the brilliant (and venerable) Nisus for WP, Keynote for pres and online services for diary, contacts, collaboration etc.

We're having a fascinating debate here at King of Shaves right now about the application of open source to manufacturing and consumer products: we're wondering if we could launch a shaving product with a beta period and an open source model. Fascinating.

Who impresses you right now in technology? Is there anyone you'd particularly like to work with? What are the changes or developments you feel are going to have the most long term effect? What could the tech community learn from other areas?

I'm really enjoying everything from the current 20-something generation of hackers. I guess it's like any area of human activity: the vigourous, young crowd arrives with no history. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because they have to repeat the preceding generation's mistakes but it's also incredibly powerful. Attending a tech conference these days is like a crazy collision of a scout camp and a rock festival: epic enthusiasm and can-do attitude plus a kind of effortless confidence and impatience with the old ways.

AJAX is a great example: I think it was born out of an impatience with the set-in-their-ways, 'can't do that' thinking of the Web 1.0 crowd. The AJAX gang have just said: "We want a richer client side experience and we're just going to hack together all these older methods to achieve it". Likewise with Ruby. Ruby may fail but the youthful, impatient mindset that created it won't and successor languages will be faster and simpler still. Web 2.0 is about renewal and energy as well as about platforms and data and APIs.

Are there any questions I should have asked that you would have particularly liked to answer?

How about "Is Andrew Keen right when he says that the cult of the amateur is killing our culture?" My answer would be: no, he most emphatically is not. And his argument stinks because it represents the twitchings of a cultural and social elite and, whatever the risks to incumbent forms of opening up content creation, no elite should be allowed to determine the shape of human culture or society.

Profile - Dave Cross

Dave Cross is the Techie's Techie. He co-wrote Perl Template Toolkit for O'Reilly and Data Munging with Perl for Manning. His Perl Teach-In at the BBC sold out its 50 places in a day, with another 40 people joining the waiting list in just a few days more - there's untapped demand out there!

Dave kindly submitted to an interview with GMT. (Photo of Dave Cross courtesy of Paul Mison):

How did you start out on the road to being a techie? What language did you first learn to program in?

I came to computing relatively late. I didn't study any computing at school. Back then it wasn't an option. Even when I started studying Applied Physics at University there was no computing in the first year. I dropped out at the end of that year, but I believe that if I had stayed on I would have learned FORTRAN.

Having dropped out, I spent the best part of a year not doing very much. That was about the time that the first home computers were coming out. Friends and family started to own Spectrums, Commodore 64s and VIC-20s. I started writing programs in BASIC on some of these and discovered that I had the right kind of brain for it. Eventually I decided to go back to college and got a place on a Computer Studies at South Bank Polytechnic.

The course was aimed at people who were going to work in large companies' Data Processing departments (remember those?) We were taught COBOL, CODASYL databases and useful things like that. Cutting edge courses were about Prolog and Expert Systems. There was more useful stuff though. One course contained a brief introduction to SQL and in the final year we were taught C.

You've toughed out some comparatively lean years since the dotcom boom: how hard was it to find work? Did you have to slum it and do less appealing work?

I didn't really see much of the dotcom boom. I spent the second half of the 90s working for various banks in the City of London. But at the end of the 90s there was a bit of a recession in the City so I worked at couple of dotcoms just before the crash.

There were a couple of bad years though. I spent about five months out of work in 2002. In the end I took a permanent job as Technical Architect at a small web company. That didn't last long though as I was made redundant four and a half months later.

I don't think I ever really had to do less appealing work. But I certainly had to cut my rates.

Are things better now? What projects are you working on? Is there a division between your projects that are public and your projects that are personal? What project are you most proud of?

The City certainly seems to be waking up again. I've just spent a year working with a large bank. Currently I'm working with the BBC on an internal project.

I don't really have many ongoing personal projects at the moment. Last year I decided that I was juggling too many things and gave some of them up. For example, I stood down as the Perl Foundation's Perl Monger Group Co-ordinator. Of course, that just freed up more time to spend on other projects. Currently I'm writing the slides for a day's worth of free training that I'm presenting at the BBC on June 2nd. It's a public course, but unfortunately the places were all snapped up within a couple of days of the course being announced.

My plan for this year is to do some more writing. It might not lead to another book, but I have a couple of ideas for series of articles.

I suppose my biggest contributions to Perl (and the wider Open Source world) have always been more community-based than technical and undoubtedly the project that I'm proudest of is starting the London Perl Mongers.

How did you discover Perl? When was that? What other languages and apps do you use?

When I came out of college, my first job was writing C programs on Windows. It was only four years later that I discovered Unix. I got a job at Disney who spent two years training me up on Unix and Sybase. Unfortunately for them, that was exactly the skill-set that the City was crying out for at the time - which is how I started contracting there. At my second contract I was introduced to Tcl which was the first dynamic programming language that I had used. A bit later I discovered Perl. I think I had a particular task to do and a colleague suggested that Perl would be a good choice of language. I tried it, liked it, and have been using it for most of my work for over ten years now.

It's not the only tool in my box. I've been using SQL and Unix for longer than I've been using Perl. I use XML a lot and over the last couple of years I've been doing more and more work with Javascript. I run several web sites so I also have some experience as a sysadmin, DBA and webmaster.

Like almost everyone in my area of IT, I've looked at Ruby (and Rails) and I'll almost certainly be doing more with them over the coming months.

Why should someone use Perl over any other language? What are your hopes for Perl for the future?

I might get drummed out of the Perl community for saying this, but I don't take it personally if people don't use Perl. For the kinds of projects that I tend to work on, you have a choice between using a dynamic language (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP) or a static language like Java, C++ or C#. I believe that most programmers will be more productive with a dynamic language, but I know that many project managers prefer the safety net of using a static language. And once you've decided which of those two camps you are in, it really doesn't matter which language you choose. You should probably base your choice on the skills of the programmers on the project.

I do see two advantages that Perl has over other dynamic languages. The first is the CPAN. No other language has a repository of free code that comes close to the size of the CPAN. The second is the Perl community. I think it's great that we have such a cohesive international community who are so keen to help people make the most of the language.

As for the future. I hope that Perl doesn't go away. Perl 6 looks like it's going to be a great language and I hope that when it is released, it gets the publicity and interest that it deserves.

How is your choice of software informed by your politics? Is there any software you wouldn't use for political reasons? Are there particular licenses or software models that you favour?

I tend to use open source software whenever possible. That's largely for practical and economic reasons. I really believe that open source software is generally of better quality than proprietary software and it certainly works out cheaper for the users. But I can't deny that using it also fits in with my left of centre politics.

I try not to use Microsoft software because I find that I'm far more productive with a Linux desktop, but I don't get religious about it. When you're freelancing you generally just use what your clients use. And in most cases that's a Windows desktop with some kind of connection to a Unix server where I do most of my actual work.

I'm not religious about licensing either. All of my personal Perl projects are licensed under the same terms as Perl itself. That gives users a choice of either the GPL or Perl's own Artistic Licence. And when I'm writing articles, I like to use the Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike licence.

Who is impressing you right now, computing wise? Is there anyone you'd particularly like to work with? What are the changes or developments you feel are going to have the most long term effect?

It's a very exciting time in the web industry. I think that people are just starting to see what the web is capable of. Barely a week goes by without some new cool web-based application being released by Google or Yahoo! and there are hundreds of start-ups filling small niches. For me, the most exciting area is the number of web sites that are making their data available though web services - allowing other sites to incorporate their data. I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of what this can achieve. In the middle of June I'm hoping to go to the Hack Day that is organised by Yahoo! and BBC Backstage. That will be a great opportunity to meet up with lots of talented hackers and to create cool and interesting applications.

But, if you don't mind, I'll pass on the offer to predict what's going to have the biggest long-term effect. Predictions like that can only look very embarrassing in the surprisingly near future!

How does being a published author help your career? How do the books you wrote feed into the courses you run? Why should someone attend your courses? How do you see the future of technical manuals?

My books were published in 2001 and 2003. And for years, the industry was in such a recession that I saw no real benefit from writing them. But now that things have picked up a bit, I'm definitely seeing advantages from having them around. One of the nicest is that it's a couple of years since a client has asked me to take a technical interview. They just assume that I know what I'm talking about.

The books obviously feed into training courses. But, of course, training courses are far more flexible than books. It's much easier to keep a training course up to date. For example, in "Data Munging with Perl" I talked a lot about processing XML with Perl. But whilst all of the modules I talked about still work in the ways that I describe, I'd never use them in a training course these days as there are far more flexible and powerful modules available. So, I suppose that's one very good reason for coming to one of my courses - you get the most up to date view on some of the topics covered in my books.

And there you have the major problem with technical manuals. They always go out of date. Particularly in a fast-moving industry like this. I'm a big book-buyer, and I'll often find myself buying multiple editions of a single book just so that I have the most up-to-date information available. Obviously that doesn't scale well, so I'm going to have to look at more electronic versions of books in the future. But whilst I'm happy to look up an online manual to get the exact syntax of a function that I'm using, I can't really see myself reading books from cover to cover on a PDA or a laptop. There will be a lot of changes in the publishing industry over the next few years and in many ways I'm glad I'm not a publisher.

Are there any questions I should have asked that you would have particularly liked to answer?

I'd like to talk a bit about the Perl recruitment market in London. Amongst programmers, Perl seems to be going out of fashion. I hear people saying that Perl is too old or too hard. But on the other hand, over the last few months I have had a constant stream of recruitment agents contacting me about Perl jobs. At a current estimate, there are something like a dozen companies in London looking for Perl programmers. It seems that there are more jobs than programmers. If you're someone who has done a bit of Perl programming, but dropped it off your CV a few years ago because Java or C++ seemed more lucrative, then this might be a good time to revisit that decision.

And that's partly what is behind this Perl Teach-In day that we're running at the BBC. It's an attempt to increase the skill levels of intermediate Perl programmers so that they can apply for the more senior jobs that are being advertised. People say that Perl is dead, but the fact that places on the course were all booked in less than 48 hours would seem to disprove that. If this first session is successful, then hopefully we'll be able to do more similar things in the future.