He first picked up his favorite programming language, Perl, while completing his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Bath around the turn of the millennium; In the years since he’s become a regular speaker at Perl conferences and open sourced many well used Perl modules, some of which ship with perl itself. On a whim he started an advent calendar that features a different Perl module each day, and — fifteen years later — having having written over a hundred advent articles like this blog post, he serves as the editor for a team of volunteers that produces the calendar each year.