Get to know about Peter Meszaros
Welcome to the monthly series Meet The Champion.
Last month we declared Packy Anderson, the winner of October 2023.
Today we are talking to Peter Meszaros, the winner of November 2023 of The Weekly Challenge. I hope you are going to enjoy the interview.
Mohammad: Tell us about your technical background?
Peter: I received my MSc.E.E. at BME Budapest in 1987 then I worked for Hungarian power system. A few years later I changed my job as technology expert for SCADA systems and slowly drifted towards programming. I wrote my first programs on VAX/VMS using Fortran.
Mohammad: How/When did you start using Perl?
Peter: My first encounter with Perl happened to be about 1998. That time I worked for Budapest Stock Exchange and I saw GNU/Linux very first time. As for Perl, it was love at first sight. I really enjoyed its funny syntax, the contexts and the inventive usage of our limited set of symbols from the keyboard. Next 15 years I wrote several small utilities in perl mostly for myself until 2013, when I started coding in Perl for solving real problems at MSCI.
Mohammad: How did you come to know about The Weekly Challenge?
Peter: Probably I was searching for something Perl-related on the net and google showed me. Or I saw it on perlmonks. I must admit I cannot recall.
Mohammad: What do you like the most about The Weekly Challenge?
Peter: I don’t use Perl at work these days at all and "The Weekly Challenge" keeps me entertained for the week!
Mohammad: How much time you dedicate every week to The Weekly Challenge?
Peter: Approximately I spend two hours with solving the challenges.
Mohammad: Do you check out others solutions and who is your favorite?
Peter: Sometimes yes. Especially if I am unsure of my understanding of the task. But always only after I pushed my solutions into the repository.
Mohammad: What do you suggest someone just started The Weekly Challenge?
Peter: Try it, it is fun to solve problems in Perl!
Mohammad: Anything else you would to like to share with us?
Peter: It would be nice to have more test cases for the tasks. Keep up and running "The Weekly Challenge"!
That brings the end of the conversation with Peter Meszaros. Please do let us know your view. We will come back next month with another champion.