Hi, I'm Mike. I'm with UGtastic here at Chicago WebConf. I'm sitting down with Andy Lester. You might have used some of his tools, www. mechanize or Ack. He's also formerly ran the Chicago Perlmongers out in the suburbs. He's written quite a bit about job hunting and how to be a good citizen inside of the open source community. Thank you for sitting down with me, Andy. Can you tell me a little bit about what your experience has been working with Ack and mechanize and all the other tools that you've created and kind of put out there? Sure.

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Okay. Is that like your standard lib? Yeah.

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Yeah. And is this something that like somebody could just go and contribute directly to an answer to?

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Yeah. Yeah. I can, I cannot say how much I appreciated at, at SCMC, a Software Craftsmanship in McHenry County. I don't often plug my own group. McHenry, McHenry County represent. Yeah. Yeah. MC. Um, but, uh, turning around and seeing that the people who came had already cleaned up all their own stuff. Sure. And I don't have to run around chasing it. And so, I can talk to people and make newbies, uh, to the group feel more comfortable. Sure. And welcome. It's, it's, and it's, so it's all part of, uh, an ecosystem. Yeah. You know, that when you pick up your own plates, I can talk to somebody who's there for the first time and make them feel more comfortable. So that way they'll come. Right. And then we get bigger and bigger and, and it, it, it has to be, it has to be ongoing. Because so much of what we do, uh, is, you know, we, we think of, we sit here and we're in awe of these great technical brains. Mm-hmm. That do amazing things. And yet, there's so much other things that need to get done. And they're not any worse. It's not like they, you know, they might not have the glamour, but they're still just as important. So on the Parrot project, for instance, Parrot is the, uh, virtual machine that is underpinning Recudo Pearl, which is the main implementation of Pearl 6. Mm-hmm. So there's an entire virtual machine, uh, that there's some incredible brain power going into creating a virtual machine. And that's way beyond my pay grade. I don't know. I, I, that's way beyond me. I don't understand, you know, sitting here comparing garbage collection algorithms. That's not, that's not, that's not my thing. You're back. Right. Right. But I can do, but what we do have is what's called the Parrot Cage Cleaners. Mm-hmm. And the Parrot Cage Cleaners are the, are the guys who go and, uh, they might look at a test, part of the test, so we can go, "Oh, this is, this is redundant to this other test here. We'll go and remove it. " Or we'll find, uh, some code that for some reason is indented incorrectly. Or a comment that's out of date. Mm-hmm. Or we'll go look in the book, in the, uh, the, uh, ticket queue. Mm-hmm. And go clean stuff up. Jim Keenan out in New York is amazing. The, the number, uh, some days, they'll just be a dozen closed tickets where Jim has gone through and said, "Oh, this is fixed, this is fixed, this is fixed. " Yeah. Six months ago. And help clean those up. Yeah. All that kind of scut work is absolutely crucial to a successful project. And that helps the people who are building the core not have to have a mess, not have to, so that way they can produce the thing, which feeds back into the people who are using it. Right. So when you're using it, you pay for it by helping do some scuttle work, and then it feeds back and comes a cycle. Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything that we do, anything that you do that helps an open source project is, is valuable. Even just talking about it. You sit here and you write a blog post about, "Hey, look, I found this project. You know, I, I, I found, you know, this foo project that I, that saved me an hour on something that I was doing. " Mm-hmm. Save, spend 10, 15 minutes writing that in your blog. And, or tweeting about it. Or posting it to Facebook. Or whatever it may be. And tell people about it. Mm-hmm. Because otherwise, people don't know about it. Right. And, you know, one, one of the things, it's funny because I have people come up to me at conferences sometime and they kind of go, I, you know, I'll say, "Well, tell me about what you do. " And they go, "Well, you know, I'm not, I'm not as famous as you. " And I say, "I'm not as famous as you. " And I say, "I'm not as famous as you. " And I say, "The only reason I'm famous is because I have a big mouth. " Right. And I talk about these things. I'm not any smarter than you are. I'm not any better programmer than you are. I just talk a lot. Yeah. And, and, hey, here we are now. Yeah. Um, so that kind, we, one of the things that, that geeks tend to not do is they don't like to talk about themselves. They don't like to brag. Yeah. They don't like to, and that's not just a key thing. People in general don't like to. And that's one of the problems, of course, that, that they have when it comes to job interviews because they don't like to talk about what they've done. They don't like to brag. But part of this is we need to brag. Not that we're bragging about how cool we are that we did this, but that this is useful. So something like ACK, I talk about ACK not because I want people to somehow, you know, adulate me, but that I want people to use it because I think it's helpful. Right. I want people to find useful things. So, and now, you know, so ACK, ACK has a website called, the ACK website is called better than grep. com. Right. Because I wanted people to have other things that are better than grep for searching source code. And there's actually a page on there where I talk about other kinds of tools that are there. Yeah. And now, so now, somebody has come along with a website called better than ACK. com. Building on top of that. Yeah. And I couldn't be more delighted. I love that we build off of each other. That, and, you know, it's not competition. It's not, it's not like, you know, people are- You're going to take away my earnings. Right. That's one of the tricks with paid software is, you know, collaboration is desired with a competitor because they're going to be taking away your profit. Right. Whereas when it's open source, it's just, hey, you just made something better. Right. Hey, now I can use it. Now my life is better. It's the difference between a scarcity mentality and an abundance mentality. Scarcity mentality thinks that everything's a zero-sum game. Whether it's adulation or love or time or everything is just zero-sum. And an abundance mentality says that the more people that come in, the more we have, the more we have to give. And so that's why I want to bring in as many people as I can to work on open source, to use, even if you just use it, that's great. Because that helps all of us. So that's my philosophy behind it. Okay. And just to kind of bring us to an end, with your talks and your writing about finding jobs, do you mention it all or do you have any experience on using user groups and conferences to help find jobs?

" Where I talk about, where I talk about, you really didn't know this in the softball?

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You want to sit here and encourage open source? You want to encourage people to write these tools?

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Well, thank you very much for taking the time to come with me. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.