[Koha-devel] re-introducing myself

[Greg Barniskis]

Hello all,

Some of you may recognize my name from the context of my long-time
employment at a leading Wisconsin public library system. My employer
has a contract with LibLime to develop LibLime Koha in ways specific
to their business needs as a very large public library consortium.
That's not really central to my job description there; I am a
technology integrator, a generalist for a pretty wide and deep tech
stack that happens to include LibLime Koha. I mainly get to watch, and
sometimes assist in integrating the outcomes of that contractual
development process.

I only bring up that subject so that I may acknowledge it as loosely
relevant in an environmental way (I know some of what I know because
of where I work), but then to really emphasize how little my employer
or its vendor relationship has to do with my reasons for writing this
today, or for that matter anything else that I may write in the
future. Just to be clear, when I'm writing things or contributing code
from my personal gmail address, I'm doing it on my own time, on my own
equipment, for my own reasons in my own context as an informed private
citizen.

Anyway, I have decided that, all forkiness aside, I would like to
contribute code and other content to the Koha community via the
community's selected tools for bugs, wiki, git, etc. To that end I
have registered for accounts on k-c bugs and wiki, and have for a long
time now been subscribed to the devel and patches email lists (I
sometimes even grok what passes on them =).

I've been using Perl as an all-purpose utility glue for quite a few
years, doing mostly smallish scripts for unix and windows systems
management. My most celebrated Perl achievement: low-jacking my
employer's old Sun server print spool in order to digitally shred its
venerable but verbose Dynix Classic ILS greenbar paper reports
directly into Excel spreadsheets on no paper. The customers seemed to
really like that trick.

In more recent years, I've also been using Perl a lot with
HTML::Template and with DBI for lots of different Access, MySQL and
Postgres contexts, all on relatively small scales. I don't really know
any Template::Toolkit yet, but I have the ora book for it and expect
the transition won't be too traumatic. I'm new to Git, but have read
enough of the relevant Koha wiki pages to think that I have now
correctly checked out the current development HEAD to play with,
formatted my first patch file, and eventually even got that first
patch emailed to the patches list (I think).

I expect I'll be limiting my contributions to low hanging fruit in the
short term, until I get a bit more comfortable with Git and Koha
internals. For now, I just wanted to say hi, and that I plan to begin
submitting small bug fixes soon and various enhancements someday, and
that I'm doing so from a context strictly unrelated to my employment.

Thanks to those who helped me get started on irc today (and to those
who will undoubtedly have to clean up my Git newbie mistakes tomorrow
=).