People

Below are the current list of Birmingham Perl Mongers, who have been brave enough to have some of the details available on the site. Most of us are at each meeting, so hopefully you'll recognise at least one of us, if you want to come and join us. We're a friendly bunch, and always willing to meet new Perl Mongers.

If you wish to include your details, send a brief bio of yourself and photo to webmaster@birmingham.pm.org. See examples of the bios below for an idea of what to include.

 
Bob Wilkinson
Name:Bob Wilkinson
Level:Contributor
CPANID:BOBW

I took a 3 hour course in programming in FORTRAN in 1980, and started to program as part of my physics course. I also attended a course on microprocessors and digital electronics, and soon realised what I wanted to do in my working life. I got an Acorn Atom in April of 1981, and started to write 6502 assembler code.

I spent a year unemployed from 1982 and spent most of it writing assembler code and Forth. I started working in 1983, and wrote in FORTRAN, and also wrote a CAD system in HP BASIC for laying out circuits. I spent a year working as a hardward test engineer on modems when the circuit boards were 15" x 12". I went to work at the Computational Maths department in Liverpool and wrote image processing systems in FORTRAN, and then used Ada a bit.

I then started to work on writing assembler routines to run on the nodes of massively parallel computers, the nodes initially being T800 transputers, and latterly the Intel i860 processor. I enjoyed the challenge of maximising the performance of the processors. The development was done on Sun workstations - running under SunOS 4.1.3. I was soon generating *lots* of data, which needed processing, and I learned how to use the Unix shell and sed and awk to manipulate it. I read "Programming Perl" in 1994, and started writing Perl, and liked it.

Shortly after that I went to work for a publishers, initially using Perl to convert data from many different input formats to SGML. I was an early adopter of CGI technologies, and showed my organisation its capability, and soon I was developing web-based catalogue systems, many of which used XML as an interchange format.

I worked for a company developing secure web sites, and wrote lots of middleware - all in Perl, though I learned some XSLT here.

I now work in the anti-Virus team at Messagelabs. We scan lots of emails every day, and my team is responsible for ensuring that any email containing viruses is stopped from getting to the customer. Most of the code is written in Perl, though recently we have started to re-implement some of the code in C++ for reasons of performance.