24 Apr, 2013 by Carl Mäsak no notes The #masakism workshop

So, as part of my $dayjob , I was teaching a Perl course. Then this happened:

* masak is teaching Perl 5 today! :) <Heather> masak teach me <masak> Heather: later; these people are paying me. :P [...] <masak> seriously though; if there were enough interest here on IRC, I would totally do a 1-day Perl 5 IRC workshop, pro bono. <masak> ditto a one-day Perl 6 IRC workshop. <vaelxon> (Perl 6 IRC workshop)++ <masak> it'd be very awesome, I promise. I'd need some time to prepare. but then we can grab a channel and basically party/learn for a day together.

And that's now what's happening. It'll be a loose-knit group of us, joining up in the #masakism IRC channel for four hours on May 1.

The course will be two-pronged; Perl 5 or Perl 6, whatever people prefer.

There will be prepared study material and exercises, but basically, people who participate can go off on a tangent, just spend the four hours solving one of the exercises really well, or solving a different exercise that they make up themselves. People can focus on doing the exercises, or on discussing various ways to solve them, or on discussing general principles of programming. Think of the workshop as a hybrid of people writing/showing nice code, and people discussing programming best practices.

Why am I doing this? Because as part of teaching Perl courses for $dayjob , I realized how much I love teaching Perl. I literally spend those two course days teaching Perl in a mild state of euphoria. I teach a lot of other courses, and some of them are great to teach, but none of them are like Perl. I think it's because I feel at home in the language, my brain has somehow "shaped itself" around Perl, and the questions I get can often be answered with a happy "let's find out!" where (a) we do some quick experiment in a terminal window, and (b) I tend to know what we'll get before, so it's easy to explain.

The whipuptitude of Perl really works to one's advantage there. That, combined with knowing my way around most of the perldoc pages and most of the special variables. Oh, and I probably have a slight advantage being fairly deeply involved in Perl 6 stuff, too.

Anyway, I absolutely love teaching Perl. Five and six. So much so that I'd do it for free. So this is me doing it for free.

As I write this, there are 13 participants signed up for the course. This is already twice as big as the typical Perl course I teach in a corporate setting. It's also a wide range of people; from relative newbies to people who could probably give the workshop better than me. I expect people further up on the learning curve to step in and assist with people further down. But I hardly need to say that; this is Perl, and we're a helpful bunch.

Here's more info about the workshop, including when, where, what, and how to sign up.