NeilB

CPAN Day (August 16th, UTC) is nearly here. Someone asked me what the goals are, if any, for CPAN Day. When BOOK came up with the idea, we both thought it was an opportunity to celebrate CPAN, but also a chance to reflect on how we got here, and to think about how we can keep driving it forward.

I also saw it as an opportunity to bang on my curation drum — give everyone ideas for how they might improve their distributions, or those of others, and in doing so improve the overall quality of CPAN.

CPAN was created by us, for us, so do whatever feels right to you.

If you do something for CPAN Day, please tweet about it with the #cpanday hashtag.

Goals

The main goal is to have some fun doing CPAN-related things, but in the process there are a few records I wonder if we might break:

• The most releases done in a single day was 150, on 13th June 2012.
• The most authors who released in a single day was 74, on 24th November 2009.
• The most neocpanisms in a single day was 41, on 22nd November 2012. A neocpanism is the first upload of a new CPAN distribution.
• The most releases in a month is 2427, in May 2013. As I write this, there have been 1250 releases in August so far. We're not going to beat the record tomorrow, but maybe we can push ourselves a lot closer.

Things to do

If you've already released things to CPAN, here's a list of suggestions for things you might consider doing on CPAN Day:

• Give your modules a good abstract.
• Give your modules a good SYNOPSIS.
• Give your modules a good SEE ALSO section.
• Make the first paragraph of DESCRIPTION count.
• Get 'CPANTS clean'.
• Make sure your distributions have the right name.
• Consider renaming a module.
• Fix some bugs.
• Fix your CPAN Testers failures.
• Check your test coverage with Devel::Cover.
• Ackowledge your contributors.
• Make sure your RT tickets have a severity.
• Put your distributions on github.
• Specify the min perl version.
• Try Travis continuous integration.
• Mark your modules as adoptable if you're not interested in maintaining them.
• Consider bumping your version number to 1.x, if your module is stable.

If you haven't uploaded anything to CPAN yet, then this is a perfect day to start. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it doesn't need to satisfy any of the points above — you can do those later.

Other things you could do on CPAN Day:

• Contribute to someone else's distribution, perhaps doing something from the above list. You could submit a pull request, a bug report, or email the author using their CPAN email address.
• Release some of your work code to CPAN (ensure you have permission to do this!).
• Thank a CPAN author.
• Have a whipupathon. That's a whipupitude hackathon: give yourself an hour to knock up the first version of something you've been meaning to do. Maybe a new module, or maybe playing with someone else's module.
• Remove a distribution from CPAN entirely.
• Delete old releases from your PAUSE author directory.
• Hug someone.
• Blog about CPAN: a module you like, ideas for how we can improve CPAN, or what things are wrong with CPAN.
• Adopt a module. You might not get to adopt on CPAN Day, but you could find a module or two from the adoption list, then email the author.
• Have a play with a different programming language, and its community's equivalent of CPAN, if there is one. What can we learn from them?
• Join GitTip if you haven't already, then join the Perl community, and possibly tip a CPAN author.
• Review a module on CPAN Ratings.
• Talk to someone in your family you've haven't spoken to for a while.
• Subscribe to Perl Weekly, if you haven't already. It's a weekly email newsletter of what's been going on in the Perl community. Here's a list of similar newsletters for a range of programming languages.
• Submit a proposal to a local Perl, or other, workshop.
• Start submitting test reports to CPAN Testers for modules you install.
• Donate some money to the Perl foundation.

A final reminder: CPAN time is UTC, not your local time.

Have fun!