Perl/Damian Conway

From Wsms

Damian Conway is a noted Perl developer and trainer. He gave a talk to the San Diego Perl Mongers on Thursday October 4.

Title "Sex and Violence: Technical and Social Lessons from the Perl 6 Development Process"

Notes:

Open source projects are different than work projects. You are subject to a lot more scrutiny.

Perl 5 was released 18 October 1994. Over the years the rate of addition of new features has decreased.

Perl 6 beta might be ready on July 1, 2008. Perl 6 is specified by a 100,000-test suite.

CPAN has more than 3GB of code.

It seems that the primary collaborative software for the Perl 6 team is version control and mailing lists.

This is his outline:

Social Lessons:

1. You can't ever know how long the project will actully take.
2. Have well focussed goals and encode them in group catchphrases
3. Volunteers are voluntary: treat them with respect and gratitude
4. Only contributors get a say
5. Stay Zen about it and doen't let the bastards gring you down
6. Produce something visible to communicate your continuing progress
7. Just do it. The secret of all success is not giving up

Technical Lessons:

1. Optimize for the common case
2. Design first
3. Stay humble; learn to back out bad design decisions
4. Less is more; find a way to fight feature creep
5. Don't give in to the theorists; design practically
6. Listen to your market...forensically
7. Project management matters; project IP must be preserved from disaster

7 Habits of Highly Effective Projects

1. Have clear and catchy goals
2. Expect developer churn (and manage it)
3. Resist the theoretical
4. Listen to the users (forensically)
5. Be zen with your detractors
6. Design carefully, humbly, and iteratively
7. Keep it fun