A decade of dubious decisions

30 minutes

Any

English 

On Saturday, April 16th 2005 I did a very foolish thing.

I joined an IRC network called irc.perl.org and a channel called #catalyst.

My life (and the remaining fragments of my sanity) have never been the same
again.

So in this talk, I thought I'd try and share a bit of what it's been like,
the fun parts, the terrifying parts, the straight up batshit insane parts,
and especially the parts that I could never have predicted but probably ended
up being the most awesome and the most useful to other people.

Part cautionary tale, part encouragement to try things you aren't really
competent to do yet, mostly a collection of random anecdotes with a token
attempt at an underlying theme, this talk won't have a moral ... but if it
did, it would be "most of the time things don't get done by the best person
to do it, but by whoever was stupid enough to try it anyway".

If nothing else, hopefully I'll successfully help you make different mistakes
than I did ...