The Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (hereafter QAH) is an annual 4-day gathering of the people who work on the core CPAN toolchain and associated systems & services. This gives them dedicated time to work on these systems together, solving hard problems and working out how to move everything forward.

Like pretty much everything in the Perl world, these are all volunteers, so our approach is to get sponsorship to cover expenses (travel, accommodation, working space, meals) for as much of the gathering as possible. If your company relies on Perl, ask yourself how much you rely on the toolchain working smoothly? Perhaps you could persuade someone to sponsor the QAH this year?

The CPAN toolchain isn't glamorous, so generally doesn't get much press, but it's an essential part of our world. So over the next few weeks we'll be posting some short articles to raise awareness and hopefully encourage some sponsorship.

The CPAN Pull Request challenge has had way more signups than I was expecting: 343 so far! Some are very experienced Perl programmers and CPAN contributors; some are long-term Perl programmers using this as a way to "give back"; a few are new to everything.

I wouldn't have predicted 300 pull requests in the entire year. Now we might get that in January alone! I know some people are concerned of the effect that this wave of locusts enthusiastic contributors might have, particularly if authors have to start dealing with pull requests that don't really add much value.

As a result I think it's probably helpful to give some more details on the challenge, give CPAN authors a chance to comment, and even to opt out.