Get to know about Nelo Tovar

Welcome to the monthly series Meet The Champion.

Last month we declared Kjetil Skotheim, the winner of December 2023.

Today we are talking to Nelo Tovar, the winner of January 2024 of The Weekly Challenge. I hope you are going to enjoy the interview.

Mohammad: Tell us about your technical background?

Nelo: I graduated as a Computer Engineer from UCLA (Barquisimeto - Venezuela) in Nov/1992. I wrote my first program in UCSD Pascal on an Apple IIe and I have also programmed in Basic and Clipper. I currently work as a devops and cloud engineer.

Mohammad: How/When did you start using Perl?

Nelo: I started using Perl in 2000, I was working as a Unix sysadmin and we needed to replicate data from 12 remote databases to a local repository. The tool we were using to do this replication often failed, so I wrote a Perl script to do the data replication. This script was used for 3 years when the database infrastructure changed to a centralized schema.

Mohammad: How did you come to know about The Weekly Challenge?

Nelo: I think I came across it in the Perl Weekly Newsletter, but I honestly don’t remember.

Mohammad: What do you like the most about The Weekly Challenge?

Nelo: I like the variety and complexity of the challenges.

Mohammad: How much time you dedicate every week to The Weekly Challenge?

Nelo: I am not sure, but I guess about 2 hours a week.

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

Nelo: Yes, I often take a look at the Luca Ferrari's and Dave Jacoby's solutions.

Mohammad: What do you suggest someone just started The Weekly Challenge?

Nelo: Take on the challenges for the fun of it.

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

Nelo: Thank you for challenging us each week.

That brings the end of the conversation with Nelo Tovar. Please do let us know your view. We will come back next month with another champion.