White Camel Awards: 2009 Recipients

Perl White Camel Awards 2009

Tim Bunce

You probably know Tim more for his technical achievements, such as DBI, but he's been instrumental in developing Perl's early community. Tim was one of the small core of people who have made Perl and CPAN what it is today. He was there at the start of the Perl Packrats, which turned into CPAN. He was involved with the Perl Module List before we had things such as CPAN Search that made it easy to find modules. He worked as a PAUSE administrator. Any one of those would warrant a White Camel, even if he does deserve several.

Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

Most of the past yearly French workshops have happened not because BooK organized them, but by his constant nudging of the de jure organizers. He's bootstrapped almost every monger group and Perl monger activity in France in the past decade. His role as YAPC Europe Foundation (YEF) treasurer is relatively new, but he's been on that board since 2003 and one of the few members that has put in real work to make the foundation work.

Michael Schwern

Schwern has been the force behind the rabid testing culture that's pervaded Perl. Aside from taking over maintenance of the basic modules that provide the framework that makes it work (a technical achievement outside the purview of these awards), he's traveled the globe advocating it, teaching it, and making it better. He's always the center of activity at a QA Hack-a-thon, where he's involved in the consensuses that come out those conflabs. The foundations he set has made Perl and CPAN the most widely tested codebase in the history of the known universe.