The Australian Perl Training Market
Perl Training Australia has been operating for three and a half years now. We're the primary Perl training provider in the Australian/New Zealand region. I get to travel a lot in order to teach people how to use Perl, and have an excellent chance to see how Perl is used by Austrlaian business. In a nutshell Perl usage is widespread, growing, and used in a diverse range of applications and industries.

Of vital importance to our business is who wants to learn Perl, and what they want to learn. A brief glance at our courses page reveals that we have a considerable range of courses available. However it's fairly accurate to say that 20% of our courses generate 80% of our material. Our introductory materials are consistently big winners in terms of sales.

What I find most interesting is the courses that people don't want to attend. Selling advanced courses have proven to be exceptionally difficult. We've attempted to present public training courses by both Damian Conway and Stas Bekman, both excellent presenters and leaders in their field. We've put considerably more advertising effort into promoting these courses than our regular beginner classes, however in both cases the response has been underwhelming.

I've spent some time trying to determine why our beginner classes are so popular, but our advanced courses are not. It seems there are two major factors of influence here:

Firstly, once people know a technology they're more inclined to continue with self-learning, or feel that they 'already know everything' and cannot learn from further training. The second reason is that many managers view skills in a binary fashion: you either know Perl, or you don't. Once an employee has completed the basic training they have a tick in the Perl box, and they don't require any further training. It doesn't matter if the employee disagrees.

The conundrum that we face is that experienced programmers are largely indifferent to our advanced courses, and beginner programmers don't have the funding to attend them.

Exceptions do occur form time-to-time. Particularly enlightened businesses will sometimes book advanced training to be conducted in-house. A few smaller niches here and there do exist, but they can take considerable effort to find and are exhausted rapidly.

Given that our primary business and majority of our income is from training, one may think this is a grim outlook, but the truth is far from it. We're running more training courses than ever before: Perl appears to be enjoying a rapid growth in a number of industry sectors, including government. Beginner courses are very popular.

Despite the growth in the beginner Perl market, I'm hoping that we'll be able to see somewhat of a change with Damian's upcoming Perl Best Practices course. This is a course that's useful for all Perl developers, regardless of their experience. Damian's new book will also have hit the shelves, which will hopefully improve buy-in from management. Places are limited, so register now to secure your place. Mention this journal entry to receive a free autographed copy of Damian's new book.

Port Phillip diving photographs
Pictures from our most recent diving trip are now online. Jacinta's done some excellent photography, although our batteries went flat during the second dive.

All the regions photographed are close to the proposed areas to be dredged as part of the channel deepening project. It's unlikely that these beautiful habitats will survive if the project proceeds.

Lesson for the day
When somebody provides you with a password for a system, sit down with them and make sure that it works. Especially if they're going away for six weeks. Don't just ask if they're sure that's the correct one, have them watch you as they try it.

Better still, install ssh keys on the machine once you have access.

I have a client who's been handed to me, and my first experience with them has been "Oh dear, that password doesn't work. I don't have access to your system."

We do have physical access to the machine, so if we need to it may be possible to boot the machine from CD and directly change /etc/shadow. I really don't want to be doing that, especially given that root lives on a linux software RAID-5 drive, and I have no idea if my regular recovery tools will mount that without complaint.

The good news is that a person who may know the password will be back on Monday. Let's hope that solves things.

A moment of rest
The next month is pretty busy, with short-staffing and training courses. However I do have a small moment of rest before that starts. Both Friday (tomorrow) and Monday will be spent in my own office, and while I don't have a hope of completing the huge amount of work that I have outstanding, I expect to complete a significant portion.

Yes, I'm calling work "rest". It's restful in comparison to the remainder of the month. There's also the weekend, which will probably also be spent "resting".

SAGE-AU 2005
I've been accepted as both a tutorial presenter and technical speaker (with a double-slot) at SAGE-AU 2005. While the tutorial is on Perl (no surprise there), the presentation is on the joys of starting a small business, and how it can be very different to what most people expect. I've got plenty to write about, my main challenge (as always) is judging my audience.

For those who haven't attended a SAGE-AU conference before, they tend to be extremely well catered, and be filled with incredibly clueful people. It helps that this year has a lagoon, heated swimming pool, beach, and five-star accomodation.

The next month...
My plans for almost every weekday in May look something like this: