If you've got one or more distributions on CPAN, then on CPAN Day you could go through them and see if there are any ideas you've had which aren't listed in the issue tracker (typically RT or github issues).

If you don't have any distributions on CPAN, then you could go through the modules that you regularly use and see if there are any issues you could raise.

I'll expand a bit on what I mean, and why it might be a good use of your time.

We've probably all got one or more modules that we're very thankful for. Maybe you use it again and again. Maybe the fact that it exists saved you from having to write it yourself. Maybe it's such a well-crafted module that you don't need to think about it, but always have it on your tool belt.

Maybe for/on CPAN Day, you could do or organise something related to that module, as a way to say thank you, perhaps to improve it for all of us?

Here are some ideas.

CPAN Day marks the date of the first upload to CPAN, on 16th August 1995. Last year was the first time we celebrated CPAN Day, and many of us did a lot of different things. Why not do something helpful for CPAN on Sunday 16th August?

The QA Hackathon wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we cover the sponsors not previously thanked here, including the individual members of the Perl community who made personal donations.

You can read about some of the things done at the hackathon in the blog posts, linked off this page on the QAH website.

The Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (hereafter QAH) is an annual 4-day gathering of the people who work on the core CPAN toolchain and associated systems & services. This gives them dedicated time to work on these systems together, solving hard problems and working out how to move everything forward.

Like pretty much everything in the Perl world, these are all volunteers, so our approach is to get sponsorship to cover expenses (travel, accommodation, working space, meals) for as much of the gathering as possible. If your company relies on Perl, ask yourself how much you rely on the toolchain working smoothly? Perhaps you could persuade someone to sponsor the QAH this year?

The CPAN toolchain isn't glamorous, so generally doesn't get much press, but it's an essential part of our world. So over the next few weeks we'll be posting some short articles to raise awareness and hopefully encourage some sponsorship.

The CPAN Pull Request challenge has had way more signups than I was expecting: 343 so far! Some are very experienced Perl programmers and CPAN contributors; some are long-term Perl programmers using this as a way to "give back"; a few are new to everything.

I wouldn't have predicted 300 pull requests in the entire year. Now we might get that in January alone! I know some people are concerned of the effect that this wave of locusts enthusiastic contributors might have, particularly if authors have to start dealing with pull requests that don't really add much value.

As a result I think it's probably helpful to give some more details on the challenge, give CPAN authors a chance to comment, and even to opt out.

Yesterday (August 16th 2014) we celebrated the anniversary of the first upload to CPAN by Andreas König (ANDK) (as he worked on what became PAUSE). It was the 19th anniversary, but the first that we've marked in this way.

In one day, 107 people uploaded 775 releases, 41 of which were the first uploads of new distributions, and 10 of which were the first upload by new CPAN contributors. The first two numbers were outright records, and the second equalled the previous best. All of those numbers were higher than I expected.

My project for CPAN Day has been to pull together a history of CPAN:

• How it was started, and by whom
• The other services that make up the CPAN ecosystem
• The key modules that have helped shape CPAN

In best CPAN tradition, this is the work of dozens of people, who patiently responded to my pestering via email over the last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who helped get it to this point.

CPAN Day (August 16th, UTC) is nearly here. Someone asked me what the goals are, if any, for CPAN Day. When BOOK came up with the idea, we both thought it was an opportunity to celebrate CPAN, but also a chance to reflect on how we got here, and to think about how we can keep driving it forward.

I also saw it as an opportunity to bang on my curation drum — give everyone ideas for how they might improve their distributions, or those of others, and in doing so improve the overall quality of CPAN.

CPAN was created by us, for us, so do whatever feels right to you.

If you do something for CPAN Day, please tweet about it with the #cpanday hashtag.

Travis is a continuous integration (CI) platform for github users, which is free to use. You can set it up so that every time you push one of your CPAN distributions to github, Travis will test it against different versions of Perl.

I've only just started playing with Travis, but I can already see benefits for using it in parallel with CPAN Testers. Why not give it a go on CPAN Day? :-)