Play Perl is online
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:
- Login with Twitter (more authentification methods will come in the future, starting with github)
- *Very* basic and limited todo-list functionality: adding tasks and closing tasks
- Likes and comments (with markdown support)
- Awarding points based on the number of closed quests and likes
Also, thanks to the Backbone.js, it feels *extremely* fast (even while working on a single EC2 micro instance). I didn't know much about frontend technologies when I started, and Play Perl was/is a nice way to improve my Javascript skills.
Design part is still lacking, it's just a basic Bootstrap for now.
If you try it and think it has the potential, please comment here or on Play Perl which features you think would make it more valuable.
I'm also usually on irc.perl.org at #play-perl and some other channels.
Here's my own early vision document which explains why I think it's not just another bugtracker.
BTW, I spend *a lot* of time optimizing website for the quick start for potential contributors. If you'd like to help, you probably can get an instance of Play Perl running on your computer in under 15 minutes (most of which will be just waiting for it to install).
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.
This looks really neat! And as if I didn't already have enough intrinsic motivation to hack on my Perl stuff...
Alright, I've added a bunch of different quests. I hope that others give it a look and tell me what they think would be cool. :-)
Thanks!
Killing people's intrinsic motivation by allowing them to publicly declare what they want to achieve without actually achieving it is my biggest fear with this project :)
On the other hand, public declaration of your goals gives you peer pressure, I guess that can be motivating too.
Awesome.
I personally like the CUDA::Minimal one; never used it but I always wanted to play with CUDA some day.
BTW, you can now see the likes count on your task list.
Deploying a new website is really motivating :) I wrote more code in the last 24 hours than in the previous two months...
I'd love to join, but am not willing to sign up for Twitter in order to do so.
I don't understand this recent trend where I'm expected to sign in "with" Twitter/Facebook/Github/etc. Why can't I just set up a play-perl.org user name and password?
Usernames and passwords suck even more. And I'm not that confident in my frontend skills, so I'd be paranoid about losing the passwords database.
If it's any help to you, sign in with Github is coming, hopefully soon.
You can sign in with email (using Mozilla Persona) now.