Support the 2015 QA Hackathon

Jan 28, 2015 by David Farrell

The Perl QA Hackathon is an annual event where the key authors of the Perl CPAN toolchain collaborate on the development of the next versions of tools. This year’s QA Hackathon is being held in Berlin, on April 16-19, and they’re looking for sponsors.

Neil Bowers has written a good summary of the QA Hackathon, so check it out if you haven’t already.

But I want to take a different tack, and focus on the tools we use everyday. For example I love MetaCPAN, it’s a sexier and more useful version of search.cpan.org. It’s open source, has a great API and provides Summer jobs for students. It also integrates CPAN Testers and the CPANTS kwalitee service, which improve the quality of CPAN modules. MetaCPAN was founded by Olaf Alders and he manages it to this day. But MetaCPAN wouldn’t work without PAUSE, which was built by Andreas König. Andreas also maintains the CPAN client, so we can install modules from the command line. Guess what? Olaf and Andreas both go to the QA Hackathon.

In the cover photo you’ll see Rik Signes (Perl 5 pumpking and Dist::Zilla author), Kenichi Ishigaki (maintainer of CPANTS), Barbie (CPAN Testers), Olaf Alders (MetaCPAN), Graham Knop (key contributor to Moo, MetaCPAN), Ribasushi (DBIx::Class maintainer), and Jens Rehsack (List::MoreUtils, File::ShareDir). They’re not yakking, they’re hacking! Seven well-known Perl hackers from 6 different countries. It’s rare that they get a chance to sit round a table together and work together.

In fact, only key toolchain contributors are invited to the event to keep the number of attendees low and productivity high. Stuff happens, big problems get solved. The attendees usually write fun reports of the event (see for example exhibits a, b and c) and always come away fired up to do more toolchain development.

So if you work for a company that uses Perl or sponsors Perl events, consider asking them to support this year’s QA Hackathon. The event itself is free; sponsorship goes towards the supporting the travel and accommodation costs of attendees. The organizers are also accepting individual donations

Cover image © David Golden

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.