Initially launched as Play Perl, Questhub is now a general place where groups of people can share their tasks as quests, and vote on quests to encourage each other. Play Perl is now the Perl realm on Questhub.

Contributing to Perl and the Perl community was never so easy. Last week Questhub gained support for stencils: pre-scripted quests with clear instructions, and bonus points. The perl realm now has an initial set of stencils, each of which defines a specific way you can contribute to Perl, CPAN or the Perl Foundation. Some of these only require a few minutes, some require a larger commitment of your time.

Yep.
I'm leaving my daily job at Yandex in 2 months to see how far I can take the concepts behind http://play-perl.org/.

I spent 7 years at Yandex, it's pretty much the only job I ever had.
I never participated in any startups.
I have no idea what I'm doing :)
But I really want to try.

Here are the slides I showed at Moscow.pm meetup today:
(I'm not sure how comprehensible they are without the talk, though.)

What this means for the Play Perl future:

• Source code stays open (for now; I'm not making any promises, but don't see reasons to close it either.)
• Service stays free. (I have several ideas about monetization. None of them include ads or require payments for the current functionality. And I promise none of them are evil.)
• I have a big incentive to take this beyond the Perl community, to the other open source communities, at least. Maybe to non-programmer communities too. I'm planning to do this as soon as possible.

In the meantime, it's been 1.5 months since my last post, so here are some new features Play Perl got:

• tags!
• comment likes;
• reward circle, displaying the number of points you're going to get on quest accomplishment;
• "quest completed" modal box;
• lots of frontend optimizations and other minor improvements.

Starting from today, you can sign in to Play Perl using email, even if you don't have a twitter account. (It won't ask you for password; it uses Mozilla Persona.)

Quick recap: Play Perl is a new social and gamified website for Perl developers, where people can declare their open source plans and get points for completing them. I launched it 2 weeks ago.

This week was much slower than the last, due to me being back to my daily job from vacation. Still, I managed to get more than a 100 commits in, including:

• the ability to unclaim quests, moving them into a global "up-for-grabs" pool
• the ability to abandon quests without removing them
• RSS for the global news feed
• 4 separate explore sub-tabs
• performance optimizations
• many refactorings, html improvements, bugfixes and new bugs, as usual

Also, thanks to the awesome creaktive@, Play Perl got a favicon. And then, thanks to the awesome neilb@, it got another one :)

Sorry for the eye-catchy title, but seriously, number of Play Perl quests created in 1 week since its launch:

$ curl -s 'http://play-perl.org/api/quest' | jq length
197

rt.cpan.org tickets created after 2013-02-07: 128 (no idea how to add a permanent link to its search results).

Some other stats:

• 282 players
• 200 comments
• 309 likes
• 1,349 unique visitors
• 28,222 page views (half of them are probably mine)

New features since my last post:

• Email notifications (if you have registered in the first few days, go to your settings and set your email!)
• New Explore tab
• Players list is now the leaderboard
• Comments preview with client-side markdown engine
• Comments and quests editing
• Auto-highlighting CPAN module names in comments
• "Like" button in quest lists

Several people wrote some really nice posts about Play Perl. Go read them if you haven't already, they explain better why Play Perl is important than I do, with my non-native crude English writing skills :)

So, what's next?
I think most important features to add next are:

• the ability to add a quest directly to some kind of a quest pool (without taking on them personally and immediately);
• the ability to join someone on a quest;
• the ability to abandon a quest, to pick up an abandoned quest, and generally move them between different states.

After all that, I'd love to finally get to the fun part: pre-scripted quests, especially for newbies (Example: "Pass a tutorial at perltuts.com"; another example: "Solve 10 new Project Euler problems in Perl and publish them online"). I want to get at least one example of such pre-scripted quest implemented and see how it will work out in practice.
And then after that, achievements.

Summing up: you guys are awesome, I didn't expect it to be so popular.
Now go and play some more :)
And don't forget that the final objective is to complete your quests and not just add them!

PS: I need help with desigining a small Perl Raptor icon. Anyone?

This is fun. Maybe even too much fun, I didn't get enough sleep last night :)
Hacking on a live website with real users is so much more interesting than developing it in a local sandbox.
(I'm developing and supporting a big website with >1M hits/day at my daily $job, but somehow it's just not the same.)

In the last 24 hours, I implemented:

• open quests counter in /players list
• News Feed with opened/closed quests and new comments
• likes and comments counter in the quest list
• several bugfixes and html/css improvements

The power of likes

play-perl.org is up.
It's a very, very early alpha. There are no achievements, no news feed (Upd: news feed is in), no pre-set quests, not enough quest metadata and almost no introductory texts.
Still, I chose to release what I have now, because I want to start dog-fooding it myself, and because I want to see if anyone will care enough to try it.
(Also, my self-inflicted deadline was February 1st; I wanted to launch it with more features, but other projects and procrastination got in the way, as usual.)

With that being said, here's what already works:

Perl community motivation survey is over. Thanks to all those who participated in it!

Here are the results: berekuk.github.com/perl-motivation-survey/.

The results contain various aggregated statistics, as well as the link to the raw data, so I'll spend the rest of this blog post talking about my interpretations and my overall experience from organizing this survey.

Hi!

Please fill this Perl community motivation survey.

It's short and shouldn't take more than 2-3 minutes of your time.
If you ever shared your software, commited a patch, reported a bug or wrote a blog post on Perl, your opinion matters.

The reasoning behind this survey:
For the Play Perl project to succeed, I need to figure out if there's a demand for this product, and which features will be more important. I've already spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it, and I'll share my ideas about why I'm doing what I'm doing after the survey will be over.

Of course I'm also going to share the aggregated results of this survey for everyone to meditate on.

By the way, Wufoo doesn't allow free accounts for users from my country, so I spent $15 on it. I guess I'm motivated enough :)
So I hope we'll get enough answers, and PLZ RT.

I want to launch a new website for the Perl community.
I'd say it's a social network, but the main purpose and the main measure of its success is getting stuff done.
I'd say it's a todo-list, but I want the list of tasks to be public and people-oriented, not project-oriented.
Oh, and it's also going to be gamified.

It's not ready yet. I have some code and a pretty consistent development pace, and I think it's a doable project, and I think I need co-developers and early adopters to succeed.

But first, a bit of the backstory...