I have been asked to speak on a Perl Certification panel at OSCON this year. I have just spent the last couple of hours reading through various mailing lists that discuss this topic. It’s scary. There seems to be a huge outcry against the concept of certification.

I have been involved with interviewing Perl programmers when I didn’t know any Perl at all. Obviously I didn’t run the interviews by myself, I had a technical expert to help me, but it still wasn’t easy. Perl has so many different applications and no two people I interviewed at that time had the same sort of experience. This was strange to me. I had been an Ingres/Oracle programmer and I knew exactly the sort of questions you would ask to determine how experienced a person was in something like PL/SQL. But in Perl I was lost. And to confuse me even more there didn’t seem to be any standard type of education for Perl programmers. In fact, I came to the conclusion that most people were in Perl because they had managed to hack together a few scripts and thought that this made them a programmer. It’s not a language that any of the local universities recognised and I was stumped. In the end we came to the conclusion that we would have been better off employing programmers experienced in other languages and then teaching them Perl ourselves.

A few years later and I know that there are lots of really good Perl programmers out there and that it is a really worthwhile language to be skilled at. However, I also know that lots of companies are moving away from Perl because they can’t get skilled staff and don’t know where to look. Some have a body of unmaintable Perl code that they have decided to re-write.

Believe it or not there are loads of companies out there that don’t know that there is a Perl community. They have never heard of The Perl Foundation or YAPC or CPAN. I attend quite a few events in the local business community and I haven’t yet met a person who has heard of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference or even the Perl programming language.

I believe that Perl is the best language for some projects. I don’t know what we have to do to get the word out but maybe certification could help. And yes I know that lots of certifications are really bad but this doesn’t mean that they have to be that way.

The story is the unit of functionality in an XP project. We demostrate progress by delivering tested, integrated code that implements a story. A story should be understandable to customers and developers, testable, valuable to the customer, and small enough so that the programmers can build half a dozen in an iteration.

– Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Planning Extreme Programming

It’s time for me to brush up on the role of the customer in an XP project. I’m going to be taking part in an XP tutorial at OSCON next Tuesday which is the only reason I’m reading XP books whilst on holiday.

It’s the time of the year when I should be prepared for the up-coming Perl conference season. I think that I am going to be speaking at YAPC::Europe this year. I submitted a proposal for a talk and never heard another thing. However, Marty seems to have received an acceptance for my talk. Maybe they liked the idea but want Marty to give it instead of me…

Last week the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, published the third part of the Employment Practices Data Protection Code – Monitoring at Work. The aim of the Code is to help employers comply with the Data Protection Act.

There are some interesting things in this.

It will usually be intrusive to monitor your workers.

Workers have legitimate expectations that they can keep their personal lives private and that they are also entitled to a degree of privacy in the work environment.

If employers wish to monitor their workers, they should be clear about the purpose and satisfied that the particular monitoring arrangement is justified by real benefits that will be delivered.

These guidelines mean that employers could be in breach of the Act if they monitor staff email.

Like most of the other people I know I now receive more spam than ham. I was interested to read that in the state of Virginia they have raised the penalties for sending unsolicited e-mail. It is now possible to be given a prison term of one to five years and to be fined. It also permits seizure of ill-gotten profits and income from the sale of spam advertising, similar to antiracketeering laws.

I realise that this is old news now as this law was passed in March but Communications of the ACM printed an article called Ending Spam’s Free Ride in this month’s edition.

Spam is now a felony in the state of Virginia, as long as the unsolicited messages contain falsified information about the sender. With the harshest anti-spam law in the United States recently passed, Virginia

We have finally got round to changing the company web-site.

Tony has been trying to teach me about branding. This all came about because I have had to listen to quite a few people over the last couple of weeks talk about branding. Most of what I’ve heard seemed to be quite mad. So Tony tried to set me straight by lending me The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

I was told at one meeting that it would be a really good idea to get a brand name that everyone was already aware of and use it for a new product. The rationale behind this was that if I used a brand that stood for quality then people would think that my new product had quality also. This goes against the first of Al Ries’ laws of branding – The Law of Expansion – which states that the power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope.

The emphasis in most companies is on the short term. Line extension, megabranding, variable pricing, and a host of other sophisticated marketing techniques are being use to milk brands rather than build them. While milking may bring in easy money in the short term, in the long term it wears down the brand until it no longer stands for anything.

– Al Ries & Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

A while ago Marc introduced us to the concept of Sticky the Stick Insect. This weekend my little sister introduced me to her new goldfish – Splish, Splash and Splosh.

The Perl Whirl starts today. I have to admit reading Casey’s blog did make me wish that I was going. However, I’ve just looked at the program again to remind me why I decided not to. Having attended quite a few Perl conferences in the past I have been disappointed by the number of new talks that appear at these events. I understand that people will always pay to hear Dominus, Randal and Damian but when I’ve already seen some of these talks three times it’s not surprising that I’ve lost interest in them. At first I thought this happened because people give their Oscon tutorials and presenations at YAPC. However, it seems more likely that the conference organisers think that because people paid/came to hear Red Flags last year some others will probably pay to hear it again this year. (It is one of the best tutorials that I have heard).

Most of the new material at the Perl Whirl is on the topic of Perl 6. I don’t know how new this will be – I’ve heard Damian speak on Perl 6 at least three times by now! I must admit that Perl 6 doesn’t interest me enough to pay to go the other side of the world to hear someone speak on it. Actually I don’t think I would even fly to London to hear about it. I also couldn’t justify it commercially as Perl 6 isn’t available to use.

Hopefully, I will get to hear some new material at YAPC::Europe and Oscon.

A month or so ago I was asked to carry out a technical book review on a yet un-published book. I have to admit that I was really flattered that someone would ask me to do this. I couldn’t see any problem with this as I knew the domain area, have read all the main books that are already out there discussing this and I love to read. The one thing I didn’t take into consideration was what I would do if I didn’t like the book! How do you tell someone who has put so much effort into a project that you don’t like it? It didn’t matter to me that I have never met the author, I still agonised over every word I had written. Was I being overly critical, had I emphasised the good points enough, how do you phrase “I can’t understand what this is supposed to mean” or “this example is terrible” in a way that doesn’t offend the author? In the end, after spending most of my Easter break on this, I gave up and just sent in the review. Next time, if anyone ever lets me write anything about their book again, I will try to remember that even though I love to read I don’t like everything I read.