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).

7 Comments

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. :-)

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?

Leave a comment

About Vyacheslav Matyukhin

user-pic 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.