Stonehenge Rock Star Grants

Josh McAdams, operator of Perlcast

In 2004, after being a Perl programmer for a few years, Josh McAdams wanted to do more to contribute to the Perl community. Podcasting was just catching on at the time, but there wasn't a podcast dedicated specifically to Perl so in March 2005 he started his own. At first it was just him talking about Perl, but he quickly moved to interviewing people working in Perl. After he traveled to the 2005 YAPC::NA in Toronto to interview as many people as he could, Stonehenge offered him a Rock Star Grant to over his expenses for the 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Josh podcast his interviews over the next year, and Stonehenge expanded his grant so that he could travel to the 2007 Nordic Perl Workshop in Copenhagen, Denmark and the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Josh received his first grant in 2006, and is an ongoing recipient of Rock Star grants.

Rob Kinyon, maintainer of DBM::Deep

Rob Kinyon has been working in Perl and contributing to the community for several years. In 2006 he took over maintenance of the widely used DBM::Deep module, which provides easy-to-use data persistence in pure Perl. From working with Stonehenge on previous projects, Rob had mentioned several things he had planned to improve DBM::Deep, although he was short on time to work on them for free. In November 2006, Stonehenge awarded Rob a Rock Star Grant to spend two months working on DBM::Deep. He used his grant to re-write the DBM::Deep core and add transaction support to the module. He concluded his work in January 2007 and wrote about it in "Adding Transactions to DBM::Deep" for Spring 2007 issue of The Perl Review. Rob received his grant in 2006.

Andrew Ford, maintainer of Refcards.com

Andrew Ford provides on Refcards.com quick reference cards for technology subjects, including several Perl topics such as the web framworks Catalyst and Mason, Perl regular expressions, the Perl debugger, and Perl testing. With his Rock Star Grant, Andrew hopes to clean up his work process to make it easier for other people to contribute and update their work. He will also be able to start work on additional reference cards. Andrew received his grant in 2007.


About the Rock Star Grants

Stonehenge Consulting awards monetary grants to individuals doing good work for the Perl community. The amount of the grant depends on the work and its benefit to the Perl community, and there is no way to apply for a grant other than develop a reputation within Perl and be working on something useful. Stonehenge Rock Star Grants do not fund new projects or esoteric research, and Stonehenge works closely with the grant recipients to ensure they carry out the grant's intent.