Yusukebe wrote an excellent post regarding Module writers and users in conferences like YAPC. He said he could not find many talks from developers who uses CPAN modules and software, rather than who writes stuff. The post is written in Japanese but I guess Google Translate would give you a gist of it pretty easily.
This is very interesting since this topic is what I also talked about with Jesse, tokuhirom and typester during the conference individually.
There are many CPAN authors in Shibuya.pm and Japanese perl community. During my last lightning talk about CPAN realtime feed bot, I asked the audiences to raise their hands if they have uploaded one or more modules to CPAN. Lots of people did, which I thought was something around 150 or so. Ishigaki-san also pointed out in 2008-2009, the number of modules uploaded to CPAN by Japanese people outstands as #1.
Hearing from speakers who actually writes software is a great experience. But at some point Shibuya.pm technical talks and YAPC::Asia has become such a place where mostly software writers showcase and announce what they did and how it's cool and why you should use it.
That's great, but there should be talks from other side of the software ecosystem: users. And actally, in this YAPC JPA prepared a Corporate track, where engineers from the big corporate explains which software and infrastructure they use and how. That is absolutely great.
What yusukebe pointed out is though, isn't Perl the best language for Sunday programmers? He did 4 talks including his 2 lightning talks where he shows off some obsessions about me :), and most code was written in less than 50 lines of code using a couple of CPAN modules. Perl should be the best language to do so because of the great CPAN ecosystem, and he thinks we should get more speakers from the Sunday programmer users side, in addition to the corporate, and I totally agree to it.
In open source development world, this side of users are often called "free riders". Free riders take very important roles in ecosystem like CPAN. But they might have a tendency to keep quiet, or think that "free riding" is not something you can talk loudly.
Absolutely not true.
If you have a request, or found a bug on CPAN modules, do feedback and report to the author directly.If you find it really useful and have a success story using CPAN modules, do tell about it, on the blogs, or talk to your co-workers. That's what keeps making Perl and CPAN better. Evangelism is not something only authors should do but users can, sometimes even better.
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