Welcome to the weekly series “Meet The Champion”.

Last week we spoke to Duane Powell, the winner of Perl Weekly Challenge - 036.

Today we are talking to the Perl Weekly Challenge - 037 winner Javier Luque. I hope you are going to enjoy the interview.

Mohammad: Tell us about your technical background?

Javier: I work for a company called Humanstate based in Sevenoaks and we run a platform called GivenGain that allows fundraisers to raise money for their favourite charities. Prior to Humanstate I worked as a Developer for Legacy.com.

I started as a C/C++ developer and became a Perl developer when I moved to the UK. I also have quite a bit of experience with React and Elasticsearch.

Mohammad: How/When did you start using Perl/Raku?

Javier: I’ve been using Perl for over 15 years now, as for Raku, I only started using it when I began this challenge. In fact, I’m using this challenge as a motivational tool to learn Raku.

Mohammad: How did you come to know about “Perl Weekly Challenge”?

Javier: Some of my colleagues and I saw your talk during the London Perl Workshop and I decided to participate as the challenges looked fun and interesting. You were very passionate about the “Perl Weekly Challenge” and I felt inspired and compelled to participate.

Mohammad: What do you like the most about “Perl Weekly Challenge”?

Javier: Some of the challenges are quite fun and different to the challenges faced during everyday work. I also like that I’m able to learn Raku. Raku is so feature rich that a lot of my time is spent learning how to do things in Raku. I’ve occasionally cheated and asked a fellow colleague for some help with the syntax especially in my first week.

Mohammad: How much time you dedicate every week to “Perl Weekly Challenge”?

Javier: It really depends, some weeks are quite simple and take me a little over an hour. The longest I spent was this challenge which took about 4 hours. The hardest part for me is transforming Perl into Raku and wrapping my head around some of the feature rich methods incorporated in Raku.

I try to learn something new every week and this week I learned about the polymod method which was quite useful in this challenge.

Mohammad: Do you checkout others solutions and who is your favourite?

Javier: I don’t really have the time to check other people’s solutions but I read the recap when Laurent Rosenfeld and Kian-Meng Ang posts them. Then you have these “AHA” moments and realize you could have solved the problem a whole different way. I like those moments as they help you grow as a person and developer.

Mohammad: What do you suggest someone just started the weekly challenge?

Javier: If you’re learning Raku like I was, it helps to ask for help, especially the first time you use it and install it.

I made the mistake and calling the interpreter with the shebang and of course this didn’t work as intended. What’s worse is that I thought it was working because on the Mac say "hello world" actually works.

Mohammad: Anything else you would to like share with us?

Javier: I really enjoy during these challenges. They help when I have some downtime. I honestly think more people should do them, as it helps you think outside the box of everyday work.

That brings the end of the conversation with Javier Luque. Please do let us know your view. We will come back next week with another champion.