Play Perl project
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...
The story so far
In the June of this year, I was going to start the big Ubic 2.0 refactoring. Then came July and August, and I still was preparing to start coding. It's not that I didn't have enough time, I'm just lazy and procrastinate a lot.
So, as a true procrastinator, I went meta and got this idea of a gamified system that would remind me that people care about what I do and motivate me and other people to do stuff.
I soon figured out I probably couldn't do it alone, so I organized the hackathon at Yandex, recruited ~7 people for one day in September, and we put together the foundation of the project. We didn't do much in one day, but it forced us to think a lot about the underlying concepts, to write a text explaining my vision, and to build the infrastructure optimized for contributing.
What's happening now
I hacked on Play Perl on my own since the hackathon. (Except for the couple of weeks when I got robbed and beaten up in Moscow streets at night, and had to spend some time dealing with that...)
I'm a newbie in the frontend technologies world, but Bootstrap and Backbone.js are cool and easy to use. I wrote a release plan today with the list of features that need to be completed before launch, and I estimate that even with my current pace of half-hour per day I can do it in 2-3 months.
Contributors are welcome
If you'll read the design draft, you'll see that there's a long, long roadmap ahead. Long... and pretty cool if done right.So if you got this far and think this project is interesting, there's a lot of fun to be done :)
I'm usually available on #play-perl at irc.perl.org, via email at me@berekuk.ru, and, obviously, at github issues.
Some technical details:
Thanks to Vagrant, the code is really easy to obtain and run on any platform!
It uses Perl Dancer, MongoDB, Twitter Bootstrap, Backbone.js and Ubic.
I wrote Ubic. I worked at Yandex for many years, and now i'm building my own startup questhub.io (formerly PlayPerl). I'm also working on Flux, streaming data processing framework.
CPAN ID: MMCLERIC.
Something like 43things.com then, but for Perl-specific goals?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things
I knew something like that must have existed!
Yes, it looks similar.
I have many thoughts on how and why I want Play Perl to work (some of them are on wiki, some are yet to be written on this blog), and styding 43things will help, thank you.
Do you think it's a worthwhile project?
Well, don't let existing projects discourage you from making/continuing your own. Very few, if any, ideas are truly original nowadays :-)
I personally find the concept around 43things cute, and have played with the site a bit in the past, but found that it is not very useful. People often write their goals but never actually make a real effort to accomplish them. I tend to believe that it's usually better to keep your goals to yourself.