Profile: Dr. Damian Conway

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BACKGROUND | ACHIEVEMENTS | INSTRUCTION | EVALUATIONS |

Professional Background

Dr. Damian Conway holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is a Senior Research Fellow with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a columnist for The Perl Journal, author of the book Object Oriented Perl, a senior member of the Perl 6 Design Team, and a popular lecturer on Perl topics.

Why Study with Damian?

Dr. Damian Conway is an extremely clever, creative, witty, and entertaining lecturer. He has been aptly characterized as a cross between Donald Knuth and Monty Python. (if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge/wink-wink)

The ratings he receives from students are routinely about as high as they could possibly be, and his presentations and tutorials at The Perl Conference have become so popular that major changes in the scheduling and duration of that event have been necessitated to accommodate his audience!

So once again, why study with Damian? Because he's so smart, such a good teacher, and so knowledgeable about the latest developments in Perl, that you'll learn so much your head will hurt (but in a GOOD way!).

What are his Perlistic Achievements?

Dr. Conway is the author of numerous well-known Perl modules including: Class::Contract, Text::Autoformat, Parse::RecDescent, Text::Balanced, Lingua::EN::Inflect, Class::Multimethods, Switch, Quantum::Superpositions, NEXT, Filter::Simple, Attribute::Handlers, Inline::Files, and Coy
(all available from CPAN).

Some of Damian's modules enhance Perl's basic capabilities in such significant ways and with such widespread applications that they have been accepted as core components of the language for subsequent versions.

Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Award competitions for the most practical Perl utility program. To give others a chance to compete, he graciously retired from this competition in 2001, and now serves as the judge for the new, eponymously named, Damian Conway Award.

Early on, Damian demonstrated a unique ability to rapidly produce hordes of world-class Perl modules that extended the language in significant, sometimes provocative, and often mind-blowingly outrageous ways. The response of the Perl community to this ostentatious display of Perl acumen and prolificity was a grass-roots fund-raising effort to hire Damian to work full-time on guiding Perl into the 21st century. So in early 2001, Damian received the first ever YAS Perl Development Grant and spent the year working on projects for the betterment of the Perl language and programming community. He is continuing this work in 2002 under a similar grant from The Perl Foundation, and Consultix is proud to be a major sponsor of this effort.

Consultix instructors, including Visiting Instructor Dr. Damian Conway, are renowned for their ability to communicate complex concepts in simple terms and to make the study of dry technical material enjoyable. We pride ourselves in providing training experiences that our customers rave about!