CPAN Day marks the day when the first distribution was recorded as being uploaded to CPAN. That was 16th August 1995, so we've been uploading modules for 21 years now!

On CPAN Day you could release something to CPAN, send a pull request on someone else's distribution, blog about Perl, or just head to the pub with fellow Perl hackers.

As you're probably very aware by now, the Perl QA Hackathon was last weekend, and it was a great success. Just under 40 people assembled in Rugby in the UK, to work on the Perl and CPAN infrastructure that everyone using Perl relies on. Many bugs were fixed, problems solved, ideas germinated, and cans kicked down the road. Those same people working alone for 4 days would not have achieved anywhere near as much, and that's why we do this, every year.

The QA Hackathon (QAH) will be kicking off on Thursday morning this week, starting 4 days of intensive work on the CPAN toolchain, test frameworks, and other parts of the CPAN ecosystem. The participants will be gathering from all over the world on the Wednesday evening.

The QAH wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we acknowledge the silver, bronze, and individual sponsors. Many of the Perl hackers taking part wouldn't be able to attend without your support. On behalf of the organisers and all attendees, thank you!

This is the second in a series of blog posts about the Perl toolchain and the collection of tools and modules around it that are central to the CPAN we have today. In the first post we introduced PAUSE and CPAN, and outlined how you release a module onto CPAN, and how someone else might find it and install it. In this article we're going to cover what comes before the release: creating, developing, and testing a module for release to CPAN.

This post is brought to you by ActiveState, who we're happy to announce are a gold sponsor for the QA Hackathon this year. ActiveState are long-term supporters of Perl, and shipped the first Perl distro for Windows, ActivePerl.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about the Perl toolchain and the collection of tools and modules around it that are central to the CPAN we have today. These posts will illustrate the scope of things worked on at the QA Hackathon. We'll start with the core lifecycle of CPAN modules, focusing on PAUSE and CPAN.

This post is brought to you by FastMail, a gold sponsor for this year's QA Hackathon (QAH). It is only with the support of companies like FastMail that we're able to bring together the lead developers of these tools at the QAH.

We're delighted to announce that ZipRecruiter has decided to sponsor this year's QA Hackathon.

ZipRecruiter.com is a website where job seekers can find jobs all over the world, and employers can list their open positions. Not only will those positions be listed on ZipRecruiter.com, they will be pushed to more than one hundred job boards and social networks. Job seekers get free email alerts with postings that are tailor-made for their skill set and location.

We're happy to announce that the 9th annual Perl QA Hackathon (QAH) will be held in Rugby in the United Kingdom. The event will run from Thursday 21st April to Sunday 24th April.

The QAH is a face-to-face gathering of the lead developers who work on the Perl toolchain that all Perl programmers rely on and build upon. The first QAH was held in Norway, in 2008, and so far it's always been in Europe. The QAH provides dedicated time over 4 days to work on the critical systems and tools, with all the right people in the same place.

CPAN Weekly is a mailing list for Perl 5 programmers. Each week there will be one short message sent to the list, with a brief description of a CPAN module, and example usage.

The idea is not to provide a tutorial, but just to make you aware of the module, and show one basic use case. By planting seeds in your mental Perl toolbox, hopefully next time you have certain needs you will think "oh, I read about a module for that!", rather than "I'll just write a module for that".

You can sign up at cpan-weekly.org.

If the Pull Request Challenge hasn't provided enough pull request action for you, you could sign up for 24 Pull Requests. The idea is to do 24 pull requests in the 24 days before Christmas Day. You have to find the repositories yourself.

All you need to sign up is a github username.

Perl hackers have now, as of today the 16th August 2015, been uploading Perl modules onto CPAN via PAUSE for 20 years. Andreas König, who did that first upload, is still releasing to CPAN, and as I write this his most recent upload is the same module that was first released to CPAN.

This post is a brief summary of CPAN's history.