parallel skillset with perl

Question

Hi, I'm a software engineer and has been working extensively on Perl. For in this competitive world I want to know what other skills are required with Perl to keep me up to the market.

Answer 1

If you mean which skills complement your Perl work on the technical side:

• Database back-end skills (SQL coding and design, performance tuning, use of DBI interfaces)

• Web skills (UI design, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Perl related web frameworks such as Catalyst - templating systems such as Template::Toolkit, XLST etc.)

• Learn Perl applications in specific niche - the best example I can think of is Perl's use in bioinformatics. That seems to be in demand and fun.

• Improve your Perl technical skill-set in depth - be sure to be conversant with modern perl - Moose, Catalyst, Higher Order Perl stuff, and features introduced in Perl 5.10 and 5.12, especially those adopted from Perl 6.

  A very good measuring stick to track your success is following Perl questions on StackOverflow and either being able to answer new ones, or checking if your answer would have been similar to already existing high-voted ones.

If you mean overall software development skills:

• Be up to date on assorted project management and software development methodologies (agile, TDD, etc.). Doesn't mean you must use them, but you must try and adopt what works for you.

• Did I mention testing yet? :)

If you mean which skills aside from Perl you need to be considered not-just-a-Perl-only-coder:

• This is kinda subjective, but one of the modern OO languages with high marketability (Java or C# or heck, C++) would probably be the most efficient addition to your toolbox to "keep you up to the market". Not the only possibility, but fairly safe and mainstream to keep you marketable