The software house had a product which was multi-platform written in C (about 2500 modules, 10,000,000 lines of code). It was a financial application that ran on VMS, 5 flavours of Unix and NT. The big issue with it was the lack of a common install and upgrade procedure across platforms. One guy was trying and failing to run a project to rectify this. The boss, a good chap and advocate of free software, bought two copies of the Camel book, one of which he plonked on the developer's desk. Still nothing happened though.

When I joined, I learned of the fate of this project, and also inherited the webmaster role of an intranet site for development, on VMS with OSU HTTP_SERVER.

I inherited a few very crufty CGI scripts and pages, mostly not written in Perl. But I had ideas for CGI front-ending the development process. Armed with the Camel book, I taught myself Perl, and started producing a site for development environment management and change control. I demoed this to management, and they were pleased - they acually encouraged me to work on this, as a major part of my job.

In those days, I was by all accounts writing _bad_ code - I had not heard about use strict, nor had I discovered the vast range of useful modules available on CPAN.

Whilst working at this place, I also bought Sriram Srivanam's book "Advanced Perl Programming", from which I learned about data structures, OO, and got an appreciation of what perl really is, and how it hangs together.

I am in touch with my former colleagues in this company, and my scripts are still very much in use - sadly, no one has seriously taken up Perl since I left in 2000. They are doing web design, but mainly PHP and JSP.

I really became a serious Perl programmer and advocate, when I discovered the Perl community. This was mainly via the London Perl Mongers, but also discovering Perl monks, and other discussion boards and lists.

If anything has really honed my Perl programming ability, it's almost certainly the Perl monks site.