Welcome to the monthly series Meet The Champion.
Last month we spoke to Cheok-Yin Fung, the winner of August 2020.
Today we are talking to Myoungjin Jeon, the winner of September 2020 of The Weekly Challenge. I hope you are going to enjoy the interview.
Mohammad: Tell us about your technical background?
Myoungjin: I remember that my first programming language was GW-BASIC. I was not good at it though. I tried to learn C/C++ by myself during my high school but still have no success. When I was a freshman in 2001, I came across a circle using Linux OS and my interest towards Computer Science started growing. However my journey was ended because I have changed the job since I arrived in Australia. I am a professional chef now and also a life coder.
Mohammad: How/When did you start using Perl?
Myoungjin: Perl was everywhere in Linux operating system and very popular also. It was natural to know about Perl itself, furthermore after making simple GUI progam in Perl with Gtk2Perl module as a hobby, I have fallen in love with Perl.
Mohammad: How did you come to know about The Weekly Challenge?
Myoungjin: I was looking for new information about Raku (actually Perl6) at blog.perl.org and found a curious link by reading Laurent‘s blog post about weekly challenge. And I had enough time to spare because my working hours reduced during this pandemic so I decided to solve some problem!
Mohammad: What do you like the most about The Weekly Challenge?
Myoungjin: “Freedom to learn and post” is the first thing I’d like to say. As a Perl‘s nature there are a wide range of solutions appear every weeks. Unfortuenately I don’t understand some solutions due to lack of my technique but I have still chance to read them.
Mohammad: How much time you dedicate every week to The Weekly Challenge?
Myoungjin: A lot of time literally, and I have spent more time because I wanted to learn other languages as well. It was fantastic opportunity to translate from a language to others and compare them. I have tried to make a my own web site for future, which I can use in a Restaurant or Takeaway shop.
Mohammad: Do you checkout others solutions and who is your favourite?
Myoungjin: I was too busy to read other’s solution because I spent too much time to write my own solution. :-) I am always waiting for the review of Colin Crain and Andrew Shitov. I am huge fan of them. I cannot imagine how it is hard to read other’s code and review!! I always surprised by other simple or impressed by thoughtful solution. I hope that I could write down nice comments like Jorg Sommrey one day. Athanasius always impress me by his explanation and reference to source. E. Choroba codes also easily catch my eyes every weeks and .. let me keep it as lazy evalutaion… and I just started to read other’s Raku code since few weeks ago. and I found a whole new world in there.
Mohammad: What do you suggest someone just started The Weekly Challenge?
Myoungjin: Keep going! You can study a language better when you are writing a working code everyday! It has been 2 months since I studied Haskell. It was invaluable experiece. And I found Raku is so well designed language. It is unfortunate that Raku is still struggling to get more attention.
Mohammad: Anything else you would to like share with us?
Myoungjin: IMHO, We maybe need to pay more attention on web applications. It would be great if I had any chance to learn with Perl and Web at the same time. :-)
That brings the end of the conversation with Myoungjin Jeon. Please do let us know your view. We will come back next month with another champion.