April 2013 Archives

Play Perl is a Startup

Yep.
I'm leaving my daily job at Yandex in 2 months to see how far I can take the concepts behind http://play-perl.org/.

I spent 7 years at Yandex, it's pretty much the only job I ever had.
I never participated in any startups.
I have no idea what I'm doing :)
But I really want to try.

Here are the slides I showed at Moscow.pm meetup today:
(I'm not sure how comprehensible they are without the talk, though.)

What this means for the Play Perl future:

  • Source code stays open (for now; I'm not making any promises, but don't see reasons to close it either.)
  • Service stays free. (I have several ideas about monetization. None of them include ads or require payments for the current functionality. And I promise none of them are evil.)
  • I have a big incentive to take this beyond the Perl community, to the other open source communities, at least. Maybe to non-programmer communities too. I'm planning to do this as soon as possible.

In the meantime, it's been 1.5 months since my last post, so here are some new features Play Perl got:

  • tags!
  • comment likes;
  • reward circle, displaying the number of points you're going to get on quest accomplishment;
  • "quest completed" modal box;
  • lots of frontend optimizations and other minor improvements.

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.