NeilB

Yesterday (August 16th 2014) we celebrated the anniversary of the first upload to CPAN by Andreas König (ANDK) (as he worked on what became PAUSE). It was the 19th anniversary, but the first that we've marked in this way.

In one day, 107 people uploaded 775 releases, 41 of which were the first uploads of new distributions, and 10 of which were the first upload by new CPAN contributors. The first two numbers were outright records, and the second equalled the previous best. All of those numbers were higher than I expected.

But it wasn't only about the numbers. People blogged; they tweeted; they baked cakes; they got together; had picnics; they watched Barbie's stats page; did major releases of well-known distributions; they exhorted us to release open source from work. Two of my favourites: Louis Erickson not only released his first module, he blogged about it; and Joel Berger encouraged us to improve how Perl web frameworks are perceived beyond the echo chamber.

In short, we celebrated CPAN with a wide range of activities, not just cranking the numbers out. But to be sure, some people did. Particularly INGY, who did 316 releases!

Has this fired us up? Will we see any continuing effect beyond CPAN Day itself? Will this push us on to new / more things? Is Kent right in his belief that "intellectual entropy serves as a source for problem solving and creativity"? Obviously only time will tell.

And what about next year? My only thought is that we should explicitly make it not about the total number of releases. We've done that now, and if we try it ever year, things will just get silly.