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jf_sp_217.mp3 (39m 14MB)

Jim Lawless writes: Jay Hannah joins the show to discuss his long-time use of the Perl programming language. We also discuss Jay’s prominence in several Omaha-based programming groups including the Omaha chapter of the Perl Mongers.

Transcript (via OpenAI Whisper):

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of J Flance’s Ignorance, except it’s not an episode of J Flance’s Ignorance This is an episode of a different podcast, a much better podcast, named Stray Pointers with Jim Lawless So I’m encouraging you to go over to the Stray Pointers feed and subscribe and auto download and auto queue But the reason I’m bringing you this podcast is that Jim Lawless interviewed me, believe it or not, about Pearl He gave me permission to cross post his feed, or sorry, his episode on to my feed But don’t just listen to this episode on my feed Please also go find Stray Pointers in your podcast app, go find Stray Pointers, and if it’s season 2 episode 17 It’s also linked in the show notes Discussing Pearl with Jay Hanna, but don’t just listen to Jay Hanna He’s the worst guest he’s ever had, go listen to all of his guests in his entire feed Stray Pointers the podcast with Jim Lawless. So here is that episode of his much better podcast. Thanks for listening Welcome to the Stray Pointers podcast where seemingly ordinary people join us for extraordinary discussions You You’re listening to season 2 episode 17 of the Stray Pointers podcast This episode was recorded on November 7th 2024 I’m your host Jim Lawless for more information about the show including the show notes for this episode Please visit Stray Pointers.com Joining the show tonight is Omaha Pearl aficionado Jay Hanna. Jay, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it You’re still not used to that aficionado title, are you? No Yeah, well, I wish I was still I I want to claim the Omaha Pearl guy title. That’s great I think you are, when I think of Pearl and Omaha, well except that I I’ll ask you something in a in a bit, but did you ever take did you ever take Pearl coding class in college? No, I’m totally self-taught. Well, the reason I asked is because I had interviewed Bob Fulkerson a professor from University of Nebraska at Omaha and he used to teach in Pearl He used to teach comp sci in Pearl as kind of an intro class And I know some folks that were his students back then and they just they still love it to this day They don’t program in it much, but they have very fond memories of all that So I was I was curious if that’s where things had started, but we’ll we’ll get into that now you and I I actually Had brought this up when when we cross paths here on Mastodon you and I had actually You were the head of the Omaha chapter of a group called the pearl mongers Correct. Yeah, and I had somehow come across the Omaha PM mailing list back in 2005 and I I posted a note to the mailing list and you responded immediately and there’s a little bit of back-and-forth I never made it to a meeting But then I ran into you again. I started to go into some of the dynamic languages users groups meetings in Omaha and And you were you were present there often talking about pearl and chem chains and things I thought this would kind of be a good get-together when I think of Omaha pearl I do think of you Well, excellent. I I apologize to Bob because he taught it. I’ve never officially taught Pearl so but I do remember when I was I had been doing pearl for 12 years 14 years or something professionally When I met Bob and he was teaching it and I’m like, oh, this is awesome, right? So he was teaching CGI and some of the CGI stuff according to the Wizards That we were going to a lot of pearl conferences back then So annually I would go and watch all the argumentation about the correct way to do pearl and the web Right, and so those things have all evolved over time, but there’s more than one way to do it, right? Yes. Yes, there is Do you know the motto? What are the three virtues of a pearl programmer? I have no idea laziness impatience and hubris That I didn’t know I must come upon that naturally, yeah, so I you know in the 90s I don’t know how far back you want to go but in my out of high school Well, let’s let’s start with your first exposure to computers and programming. When did that happen? Oh Way back. So my dad had an IBM PC jr. That he bought because he was big on IBM as the brand, you know, so when he bought a computer for the family It wasn’t the Commodore 64 that my friends had that had the cool games on it It was the IBM PC jr. Where the games were more expensive. It’s not as fun But MS-DOS basic way back then was where my earliest memories and I remember the three color graphics of CGA Well, what’s it called? See do you see GA graph? Yeah, it was color graphics array or something. Yeah Yes, I am or adaptor The only had three colors right the resolution was terrible and yeah, no was your dad a programmer No, no. No, so so my parents didn’t know anything about computers and still don’t so, you know every day IT tech support for my parents to this day. They’re both still with us, which is amazing And they’re both as frustrated with technology as they have been since the 90s But yeah way back in the day Like I was in middle school or grade school even with the IBM PC jr. And we got a 256 kilobyte memory expansion board which was a foot and a half long and an inch and a half thick and that was amazing to have another 256 kilobytes of memory sure, you know, which is nothing now obviously, but yeah back then it was huge and it was you had to take off the side of the IBM PC jr. Like unscrew the entire side of it and the Adaption board it was six inches long So a six inch long slot thing went chunk into that and it was very expensive at the time to get another 256 Kilobytes of RAM, but yeah way back then and I’ve got a I don’t remember the name of the book but I can find the reference for you and send it to you and you can put in the show notes, but Programming MS-DOS basic games like we would physically buy books that had MS-DOS written in them So line 10 line 20 line 30 line 40 you would type all this stuff in and it would be a game in MS-DOS so yeah, that was my my earliest experience and then thinking I was a wizard in MS-DOS by Coming up with some my own graphics that I thought were fascinating so I Had to draw a series of lines that looks like it turns into a curve. So, you know, when did you first encounter Pearl? Right. Yeah, so so we’d have to jump Past the IBM PC jr. And then during high school, I ran bulletin board systems So we moved from after my freshman year in high school we were living in a suburb of Detroit called Livonia and we moved from Detroit to Sioux City, Iowa and I Didn’t have any friends I didn’t know anybody and coming into the 10th grade in Sioux City, Iowa Every kid knows every other kid and they’ve known them for 10 years, right? And I was the outsider and so I decided I was gonna run a bulletin board system And that’s how I found my friends in high school is other nerds. We were playing Galactic War Zone These are BBS games with the phone line with the fun squealing noises and all that and they would call into my My bulletin board system and did you write your own BBS? I did not write my own BBS We were running I was running teleguard. I think okay. So yeah, so those were the early days and then I Think it’s my senior year of high school or the summer before my senior year there was a guy who was looking for computer help and my friend and I had opened a Retail shop where we were building Parts so if you remember Gateway in North Sioux City Let’s see, that would have been North Sioux City South Dakota, right? Yeah, they were in Iowa too. They weren’t in Sioux City, Iowa as well So there’s there’s Sioux City. There’s North Sioux City and there’s South Sioux City And so I don’t remember the geography of which so you actually across the state line, I think to get to Gateway They were the computers with the cow cow skin designs on the boxes, you know, and I worked there one summer So we opened this retail store and we were assembling PCs Which was cheaper than you could get them anywhere, right? Because the PC affordable PC parts explosion had happened and my friend was a big hardware nerd I was I’ve never been a hardware nerd, but I love the software side of it in the programming side, but He convinced me and my parents to invest in opening a retail outlet in Sioux City, Iowa And so I think it was called comp universe was the name of it So we painted our own sign and shoved it on a building and it was a very low-budget operation But yeah, we built a bunch of custom computers for people back when you could just open up a two-inch thick catalog Flip through these catalogs by the parts because this is how much memory they want This is that the disc they want by the case everything everything gets shipped. We custom assemble your computer For you and then you walk back into the store and grab it We had software on the shelves and all that stuff was this a lot of the catalogs you mentioned was this computer shopper magazine? It might have been yeah, I don’t I remember it being two inches thick. Yeah every month every month. It was two inches Yeah, it was amazing. But the the amount of money you could save by Assembling your own but most people don’t want to do that Most people don’t know how you know, the various parts work and how to assemble them so we would do that for people obviously and market up the price and Thought it was good money. And obviously it went bankrupt because it was two high school kids running a retail shop But a very small retail shop. Anyway, so after that summer Or the summer before my senior year maybe I heard a guy was looking for help with computer stuff and I went down there and met him somewhere downtown Sioux City, Iowa and He said I need you to program this website to do this thing and this was Way early. This was 1993 and I said, I don’t have any idea how to do that And he handed me a book and it was O’Reilly and it was programming pearl Then he said here you go, and I’ve still got that book. It’s on my shelf over there But yeah, he handed me programming pearl and said here figure it out So I figured that and then I program pearl for the next 30 years or something So you have a formal education in CompSci? I don’t I went to Iowa State University and Was very frustrated by the computer science courses at Iowa State University Switched majors three times dropped out three times And then got a job Working up in Yankton, South Dakota for a Company who was going to Gateway getting pallets of parts that they had overstocked or they were just getting rid of them or whatever and Paying, you know ten cents on the dollar for all these parts and then reselling those out on the extremely early Internet so that would that would have been

  1. That was my first job out of college. Yeah Okay, and then and then how did that unfold into your early career in pearl well, so the the first job was the reason they hired me is They said oh, yeah, we need this inventory on the internet. Well at Iowa State University they had computer labs that were really cutting-edge at the time and they had a Thing called the Internet and so I was creating Websites on the Internet when NCSA mosaic came out and the 1.0 That was when suddenly websites had images in them. That was crazy This is my freshman year in college. And so as when that came out, I was State University They already had a system in place where they would give you an account on their Unix systems back systems Remember? Yeah, I’ve got they were annuals. They were big VEX. They were a big VEX School. Yes. Yeah, so you’d create an account you’d say yes, I want a public home page and your account would then have a tilde public underscore HTML directory and Anything you put there was on the internet for people all over the world to hit it was crazy Like this was mind-boggling because I you know for years well for three years. I had been doing long-distance phone calls Via bulletin board systems on an old 2400 BPS modem To one person at a time and then we’d have like mail relay chats or whatever so we’d have a network and the BBS would have to dial each other the relay the messages around and the fact that I could be sitting at Iowa State University Connected in multi-user dungeons to 50 people all over the world put in the same RPG style Text base at all text there’s no images Environment playing this game was mind-boggling to me for free, right? So the internet we weren’t paying long-distance phone calls So my parents got really tired of the long-distance phone bills and I got in trouble a couple times When things kind of spun out of control on the phone phone bill front but yeah, so yeah, my very first job was They said hey We need somebody that can put our inventory on a website and I’m like I can put your inventory on a website Right as well as anyone can at the time because it just started like the tech Just started and I was in HTML doing bold tags as way before CSS existed You know, so you do a little B tag and that’s bold and that’s as advanced as you know, HTML got so yeah so the the first phase of that job was Oh put the inventory on the internet and I did and It started selling pretty well and then that snowballed rapidly Because it wasn’t very long before I my website on the internet was out pacing their sales department Right. That was the scale. This was everybody’s minds were exploding at the time in e-commerce, right? because of brand-new this whole internet thing and the internet was getting popular and That was huge. And then phase two was oh we want to turn this into an auction site so I wrote an auction site in ASP What is now called ASP classic? so a Microsoft Microsoft stack Microsoft SQL Server what is now called ASP classic and developed a So that part wasn’t in Perl. The first one was the second one was not But developed a website and that turned into an internet Internet startup when you try to raise money on NASDAQ, etc, etc, etc. So that was my first job out of college Oh, very cool so then You’ve done non web Perl programming though. You’ve done some pretty heavy database stuff in Perl. Have you not? Oh, yeah yeah, so my probably the strongest skill set I have is database manipulation and most of those stacks have been Perl stacks when You count up the years that I spent doing it. So yeah, I spent many many many years doing database manipulation. So We did run the website at like Omni hotels. For example, we took over the The licensing for the website that we were using the vendor website I was like, well look I can you know If you give me that four million dollar budget, I can do it way cheaper than that. And so we actually did that we took over Omni hotels and their affiliated brands. We rewrote all that in Perl. So that was all Perl So that was web Perl, but that was all sitting back back in informix database at the time So, yeah, so yeah, and then a lot of my years have been rest API Development in either Perl or Golang that’s been a lot of my more recent stuff. Okay, and Extremely recently a lot of Python. I’ve gotten gotten into a bunch of DevOps, but Unfortunately, I haven’t had anyone pay me to do Perl in a while. So I am Very willing to program Perl for a living if anyone wants to hire me to do it. I love Perl. It’s great now Did you follow the the Perl movement into Perl 6 and what’s called RACU now? Right. Yeah, so at the time our company was a Perl consultancy was a big chunk of our business, right? so this is a company called infinity interactive that I still work for so I’ve been with infinity interactive for 13 years and We were one of the big Perl consulting shops in the world So we had some of some of the people like the VP of tech when they first hired me invented the de facto Object oriented Sister or an object orientation system for Perl 5, right? So he’s like as big a celebrity as you could be in the Perl universe next to Larry Wall who invented the language, right? So after Larry Wall, it was my first boss that hired me So yeah, we sorry. What was the question? Well, I was asking if you if you followed into Perl What became RACU? Right, right. Yeah, so so Perl 5 Originally because I started I think in extremely early Perl 5 if I got the timeline correct and then what happened was there was a lot of features and backwards incompatibility that people were looking at and so that was called Perl 6 for about a decade I think and After 12 years or something of calling that Perl 6 They rebranded Perl 6 as RACU. And so now it’s it’s referred to as the Perl family of programming languages So a lot of the RACU and Perl conferences nowadays are Combined the Perl and RACU conferences because they have a lot of shared history But the RACU interpreters there’s multiple RACU interpreters last I heard And the Perl interpreter are two different things. So the modern Perl now is version 5.40.0 That’s current stable. So okay. Yeah, but I’ve never programmed RACU like so like every year we would go to the Annual it’s called YAPC. It was called YAPC at the time yet another Perl conference North America So we’d go to YAPC the whole company would go there and that was our big annual meetup and that was that in Vegas several years in a row and So we’d all be in Vegas as our corporate retreat at the Perl conference so we do our Infinity Interactive stuff and we do the Perl conference and Yeah, so every year Someone would be presenting RACU then I’d be like, oh that’s cool. And I’d be on my laptop while they’re demoing RACU Installing RACU

working and I’m like, oh, that’s cool. And I’d play with a few syntax things and that was about it. So I never, I never had a business purpose to use Raku. So I never actually learned how to program Raku. So let’s talk a little bit about a community. So I had alluded to the fact that you were, uh, you were very active. Well, I think you were the leader of the Omaha Pearlmongers group back in, uh, I think it was 2005 when I said, uh, I, I joined the mail list. You tell me a little bit about what the Pearlmongers are. Right. Yeah. And I’m still the, I call myself the international, uh, Pearl ticket monkey. So all of the Pearl groups all over the world, I’m still the guy that keeps the website running and updates things. And so I’m actually kind of embarrassed right now because two months ago, the API for the Google maps or the website broke and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. It’s it’s on my list. There’s Pearl work, man, Pearl work. Gosh, it’s JavaScript work. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as my current DevOps nonsense that I’m doing. Um, but, um, yeah, so all over the world and several different languages that I’d try to translate, people would contact the Omaha Pearlmongers, uh, the pm.org website. And we had hundreds of active groups that were changing all the time and leaders would change. So we, uh, supported all the mailing lists and, um, uh, so that most of those were mailman based. Um, so I would be creating new lists. I would be doing, uh, administrator password changes, et cetera. Um, it’s all in a get repo. So there’s a huge XML file that contains all the configurations. So when people contact, I go in and mess around with the XML file and then flush the website, uh, updates out. So Pearlmongers was a way for you. Uh, basically it was a series of localized Pearl users groups and the site that you’re talking about was kind of a way to locate them. Right. Yeah. So if I’m traveling to Boston, right, I could just pull up a map and see, oh, okay, there’s one group or two groups in Boston or whatever. And I can click whichever one. And then from there I can see whether or not they’re meeting that night, et cetera. So I could just swing by and say, hi, when I’m traveling, you know, all over the world. So that was the idea. So the idea, I think of the local, um, user groups at all, uh, like why do it is that I feel way more connected to the technology platform when once a month or something I show up with other people who are using the same technologies and we, you know, someone gives a presentation or there’s just a bunch of lightning talks or whatever, and people just show what they’re working on. And that’s a very cool way to feel connected geographically to the work that I’m doing for my job, you know? And so it’s really neat. And I, I wish there were, uh, connections like that right now for all the tech stacks that I’m doing. Um, but unfortunately I’m not a JavaScript programmer, so I go to Nebraska JS, but I have no idea what they’re talking about because they’re, you know, trying to work through the latest iteration of the 15 competing frameworks for the whatever. And I’m just kind of staring at it going, why was that? Like, you’re solving this problem that never should have been a problem in the first place. Like why did you, you know, and it’s not their fault. They’re like web, you know, web dev is a whole universe of pain. Um, so Nebraska JS is great and you should totally come to those and you’ll, you’ll probably see me there on the months that I can go. Um, but you know, I’m doing a lot of Python now and there’s no Omaha Python group. No one gets together to talk Python. No, I’m not. It’s sad. Python. So many people use Python and I’m using Python every day, but there’s no group of nerds that I can just go hang out with and, you know, eat a piece of pizza or drink a beer or, you know, whatever. And, uh, you know, I’m doing just tons of Docker now and the, uh, not, you know, not really, I’m doing a ton of AWS stuff. But when I go to the AWS meetings, it’s not programmers. It’s like people that are trying to, you know, negotiate their way around how Amazon is currently working. Right. It’s like programmers have a very different perspective on the universe. We want to be like masters of our environments and we want lots of control to be able to just meld these universes that we create, uh, into whatever shape we want them to be in. Right. So when I’m really tearing it up programming, I’m, you know, creating these worlds within worlds of things that are totally under my control and I can do anything. I can take, you know, if something is not working correctly, I can rip that whole thing out and, you know, just go crazy and see within five seconds, whether I broke it or not. And I did 95% of the time I broke it. Like the process of programming, it seems to me is 95%. It’s not working. And at the very end, you’re like, oh, okay, got it. And it works and all the tests pass and you’re like, yeah, but that’s just not the environment in, you know, in DevOps. Right. It’s a very differently paced, uh, uh, situation. So, yeah, I would love to sit with nerds once a month in a social environment, uh, to learn something and to show somebody something and that kind of thing. And that’s what I did for years at, uh, four different user groups. So the, the Omaha Pearlmongers group then metamorphosed into the Omaha dynamic languages users group, which was inclusive to, I, it says dynamic, but I don’t know that any language was really ever turned down if, if somebody wanted to speak there. Oh no. Yeah, no, it’d be great. Like anyone was totally welcome. What was the genesis of that? What, what caused that to change? Well, so from my personal perspective, um, I wanted to use a group just to talk about cool stuff and feel more connected to, um, what, what, what are the new things that just came out on, on Pearl? It’s called CPAN, the comprehensive Pearl archive network, but you know, every language has repositories of, you know, cool stuff out there that people already wrote this stuff. Great. Um, so I, I started the Omaha Pearlmongers just because there wasn’t one. And so I was at my job talking to all the other Pearl programmers and I’m like, Oh, Hey, what, you know, why don’t we just get together every third Thursday or whatever, and just have pizza and, you know, soda and whatever, and just talk about latest Pearl stuff. And every single one of them was like, no, I’m doing, I’m programming all day, every day. The last thing I want to do is go to some nerd meeting in the evenings. And I’m like, oh, come on, it’ll be fun. So I’m glad other people are, uh, open to doing that on occasion, because it really helps me to get other people’s perspectives on what is going on in the tech. And when I can see someone else that has a different idea that I never thought of, that’s huge. I mean, that, that might save me a week’s worth of, you know, mucking around or going down the wrong path or something, and someone else already solved it. And I’m like, oh, that’s really clever. That’s really cool. I love that you presented that. So, um, but yeah, so Omaha Pearlmongers, I ran that for years and years and it didn’t have to be Pearl, but it was like, you know, that was my focus because that’s what I was doing. And there were other groups for other languages. And I’m like, well, let’s have a Pearl group. And I think what happened is after doing that for years, I just got tired of listening to myself, talk about it constantly. And I’m like, okay, well, what we should have then is we should have more of an umbrella group, but it can be any language. It doesn’t have to be Pearl. And we’ll just like, as us, as the Pearl nerds, we’ll just show up and invade the group, right? We’ll be the Pearl guys, whatever. And whatever solution they’re talking about, we’ll show how that works in Pearl. So I think, um, chronologically we first started crashing the Omaha Ruby and open source meetup, right? After the Omaha Pearlmongers, we just said, oh, okay. The Omaha Pearlmongers were open source. We’ll just be part of the Omaha Ruby and open source meetup. Right. And so we did that for quite a while. And then that closed down and then we’re like, oh, okay, well now where? So it was then it was the Omaha dynamic language users group. And so we were there for a while and then the other leaders left or moved out of town or whatever. And suddenly I was the leader again. And I’m like, oh my God, this is my third, the third group that I’m leading now by de facto, everyone else left. So I’m the person that’s still organizing. And then after OD lug, it was OMG code. So at the Omaha maker group, oh, that’s right. Yeah. We showed up and did the source code version. So it was OMG, Omaha maker group, exclamation point code. Right. So then we did that for a couple of years, I think. I don’t remember what ended OMG code. Uh, but yeah, so I I’ve, I’m personally responsible for collapsing four different user groups in the Metro. And I, I want to apologize. I’m easy to get along with. I swear. So I have to ask, were you at the meeting? I was not, but were you at the dynamic languages users group meeting where, uh, Randall Schwartz stopped by? Yep. Yep. You should have come to karaoke. We went to karaoke afterwards with Randall. So Randall was probably the most prominent, uh, Pearl guy around at one time. And he then became a prominent small talk guy. And now he’s big on, uh, flutter and dart, I think, are his, uh, four days now. But, uh, so I, I missed that talk and I kick myself for missing it. Um, do you, do you have people or were there people that you, that were your idols that were like Pearl idols or maybe just general coding idols back in the day? Well, when, so Steven, Steven little is his name. And he was one of the three guys at infinity interactive that, uh, invented this OO system called moose. So, so Pearl five doesn’t have, well, I guess I can’t say that anymore unless you want to, if you want to talk bleeding edge, Pearl five, we can talk about that. But, um, for years and years and years, there was no OO system native in Pearl. So what do you do? Well, you invent one and you put it on C pan and then everyone downloads it and it works great. Right? So that’s what we were doing in production for decades, this thing called moose. Well, Steven little was kind of the lead author. I believe he would allow me to say that, uh, I’ll have to drop him a note and see if I’m screwing this up. But Steven and three other guys at the time at infinity interactive were the core contributors to the OO system of Pearl, which was huge. And I was burned out on the hotel industry, studying bioinformatics at university of Nebraska, Omaha, and then burned out on that, started my own consulting business that wasn’t getting much traction. And Steven little called me and said, Hey, do you want to work from home as a consultant? And I, that was crazy. That was like, I don’t do sports, but that’s like the most famous sports person calling you and asking you if you want a job. And that was nuts for me. So yeah, he was, he was a huge inspiration to me because he’d be giving all these keynotes at the Pearl conferences about how we’re so, so I’ve always been a developer. I grabbed tools and I use them for a business purpose. That’s great. But there’s a whole other tier of people that aren’t just solving business problems. They’re solving problems for the programmers that are solving problems, right? They’re down a step in the stack. Right? So the hardcore Pearl people, yes, they’re great Pearl programmers, but they mostly are programming C because the Pearl interpreter is written in C. And so you have to be a C programmer to really fundamentally do optimizations of Pearl performance metrics or whatever. And every time I’ve tried C it’s I’ve been so unhappy Pearl’s spoiled me since the nineties. So I just don’t have the patience for C programming, but to, to watch a keynote and it happens to be your boss where they’re talking about, here’s the 18 month plan of where we’re taking object oriented programming of the entire language that I’ve now been doing for my career for 20 years or whatever at the time to watch them plan there, here’s the roadmap we’re stealing this awesome idea that we found from this language and this idea from this language and this idea from the, because Pearl just unapologetically has always stolen from the beginning. Every cool tool, every cool thing from every cool tool that it found, like the best of best of breed across all computer programming. We’re going to put that in Pearl because it’s so flexible. You can do that. So yeah. So yeah, I think Stephen little was, was one of my heroes and I couldn’t believe he offered me a job. So that was cool. Yeah, that’s very cool. What was your favorite or what was your preferred Pearl development environment? Are you talking about IDEs? Oh, I was in Vim forever. So I had been in, I had been in VI for so long that Vim was like, oh, okay, that’s fine. And I’m not Nick Nisi NeoVim guy. And as Vim started doing all the syntax highlighting and stuff, and I’m like, oh, my, my brain, my eyeballs. I just can’t, I kept turning it off. Right. So even in Vim, I was turning off features that kept becoming the default because my eyeballs just couldn’t get used to syntax highlighting. It’s like, you’re slowing me down. This is really messing me up, slowing me down. Just give me the standard VI commands because I’ve been doing it for so long. So, so nowadays I’m in VS code and everything’s massively highlighted. My ID is enormous. Right. And every once in a while, my whole machine chugs and I’m like, what’s going on? Oh yeah. Yeah. Plug in number 572 spun out of control and my text editor doesn’t work anymore. It’s like, oh, great. You know? So, but yeah, I was VI for ever. I don’t even remember what year I finally was like, oh, okay, well yes, syntax highlighting. But so as my career became less, mostly Perl and this language and this language and this language, and we were doing Haskell and all the, you know, we’re doing all kinds of stuff. And whenever it’s a foreign language, I want a fat IDE because the help that it gives me, because I don’t know what I’m doing. So the help that it gives me visually and all the keyboard shortcuts that it does and all the auto indention and, you know, all these things and it squiggles all the bad parts and all that automatically. But I had been so long in Perl that I was just a Vim guy for ever. So I think it wasn’t really until Golang that I even got into VS code or yeah. Visual studio code. Yeah. So I think Golang is what made me finally go, okay, well I have to be in VS code to survive Golang. And it has all these cool features for Golang. And now that I’m in VS code so much anyway, I might as well also use it for Perl editing. So that’s how I ended up in VS code. Is there anything you want to, you want to say that we haven’t covered? Oh man. So why isn’t there a Python group? Let’s get one started. Who’s that? Like everybody uses Python, right? Let’s, let’s do that. I want a programmer minded perspective for cloud stuff, right? Every like cloud meetup thing that I’ve gone to has been about how do we negotiate better contracts for better pricing tiers and stuff? And I’m like, no, no, no. I want a nerd out on the syntax. Right. So now I’m in like Terraform most days all day. And I’m like, where are the nerds who are doing Terraform stuff? Like really hacking at Terraform because I I’ll show up at various meetups and it’s like, well, here’s how you can better interface with your customer support team. And I’m like, no, no, no. I want to actually hack on it. You know? So it, it just feels so strange to be totally disconnected. All the stuff that I’m doing doesn’t have a local community. And it’s great to have a local community. I love leeching off their knowledge and I’d love to give little presentations on what I’ve been up to. And it always surprises me when somebody is like, that is cool. And I’m like, really? That’s cool. Like, I didn’t think that was the cool part, but other perspectives are just really valuable. So I guess my sales pitch is start a local user group if there isn’t one, because whatever you’re doing there’s probably other people out there. And if you start it maybe maybe you’ll get a bunch of other people to show up to your thing. I did it for 20 years, so I probably shouldn’t start more groups, but I’ve already killed four groups. I don’t, I shouldn’t kill a fifth group. Do you think a Zoom based meeting would would fly? Would that be the same for you? Would that be too much like work? Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah. There’s something about in person. There really is. It’s good to get out of the house. I work from home. I work from my basement, right? So I do need to get out of the house. So there’s the Omaha Coworking Group on every Wednesday and I only, I haven’t gotten out there as much as I need to. I don’t know. I need to leave the house more is my parting message, I think. Great. Jay, thanks for joining us tonight. I really enjoyed it. Oh, great. Thanks for the talk. Appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening. Let’s do this again soon. Take care.