Even though I haven't used Perl professionally for about 6 years or so, my Perl FOSS work has driven pretty much my entire career. Starting in around 2000 or so

Even though I haven't used Perl professionally for about 6 years or so, my Perl FOSS work has driven pretty much my entire career. Starting in around 2000 or so, I started producing a lot of Perl modules (libraries). You can see what I've uploaded to CPAN at https://metacpan.org/author/DROLSKY https://metacpan.org/author/DROLSKY. Some of those libraries became _very_ widely used in the Perl community. The number one most used is probably DateTime (https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime), and number two is probably (https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch). But some of the others also got a lot uptake. I also contributed a lot to libraries create by others, most notably HTML::Mason and Moose, both of which were very widely used in Perl. All of that, plus speaking at the Perl conferences, really helped me develop my professional network. If I recall correctly, all three of of my most recent jobs came about because of my Perl connections to varying degrees. Two of them were just because I posted on my blog that I was looking for work and someone I knew through Perl reached out. Today I work in Golang at MongoDB. In 2022, I again posted that I was looking for something new and someone I knew from Perl who worked at MongoDB reached out to me. I'm really thankful he did, because working there has been great! Nowadays I don't do much Perl any more, though I still maintain many of my modules (bug fixes and small feature requests only, though). I've also done some Golang (https://github.com/houseabsolute?q=&type=public&language=go https://github.com/houseabsolute?q=&type=public&language=go) and Rust (https://crates.io/users/autarch https://crates.io/users/autarch). But I think it would be _much_ harder for a young person to do the same things I did. Nowadays there are just so many freaking programmers. Someone invents a new language and five minutes later there are a huge number of foundational libraries for it. By the time I started with Go (mid-2010s), pretty much all the stuff I had done in Perl already existed in Go. And I found the same to be true with Rust when I started using it after Go.