Joy of Editing

In addition to futzing around with technical design stuff today, I spent part of the afternoon doing volunteer copy-editing for The Perl Review. As some of you may recall, I volunteered for this last month after the magazine's editor caught me criticizing his grammar on my weblog.

As free labor goes, it's pretty fun. I have no training as a copy editor, but I worked on a campus magazine during my first few semesters at Amherst and I'm generally pretty good with grammar, so it's not hard. And reading the magazine is educational because I'm just starting to get into Perl programming again. I think my favorite part is the "Perl Golf" tournaments, where people try to solve simple programming problems using as few keystrokes as possible. It's exactly not what you want to do in a professional development environment (where it's more important to write code that other programmers can read) but it's neat to see how people go about doing it.

( And if you were wondering about my trip home... )