( If you want the text below narrated instead - watch the video, there is also an alternative comment thread on reddit )

On the 1st of October I launched a daring crowdfunding campaign. I asked over thirty companies directly relying on my open source work to split a rather modest bill, allowing me to exclusively focus for at least a year on several key parts of the Perl5 library repository (CPAN). Two months later, after a really promising start, the campaign is effectively dead.

Note: If MMORPGs are of interest to you, please read through this and answer the simple questions at the end.

I'm still diligently hacking away at Veure. About a year ago I wrote that I had 17% of the alpha tasks done. Given that I've added a number of alpha tasks (and pushed some back to beta), I'm relatively pleased that as of this writing, I have 81% of the alpha tasks finished, with over 90% of the commits by me. It's daunting single-handedly writing an MMORPG, but we've a developer who's been working on it and will be returning to it in June, so that's going to help. We're also looking at hiring a narrative designer to flesh out content. Writing a game is hard, but filling it with content? Hoo boy! It's the difference between outlining a novel and writing it (well, not exactly, but cut me some slack, eh?).

And that brings me to content. Much of $secret_mmorpg_name (legal stuff, sorry) will be impacted by missions, but what are missions?

So, it turns out that working full time on a great contract, overseeing employees/contractors on other contracts, trying to build an MMORPG, working through legal issues associated with said MMORPG, preparing conference talks, and trying to be a good husband and father is a wee bit time-consuming. That's why I probably didn't answer your email or write a blog post in the past month.

So to let those interested in Veure know that it's not dead: we have bars! (Amongst many other things). Read on!

It's great when organizations with (marketing? public relations? good will?) budgets authorize financial backing of events like the Perl QA Hackathon. Donations to these kinds of efforts are one of the many ways to contribute to the Perl ecosystem. But did you know you can donate to the Hackathon personally?

This year, I decided that I wanted to make a donation to the Perl QA Hackathon (albeit modest). For those of you who have some spare change burning a hole in your wallet, maybe some of the reasons I decided to donate will resonate with you.

My relationship with Perl is personal. I use the Swiss Army chainsaw because I choose to. The fact that I am employed by a company that wants to leverage this choice is almost happenstance. Said another way, if my employer decided to stop developing in Perl, I would seek a new employer.

I use Perl because I enjoy it. This enjoyment is strictly due to the efforts of a lot of really bright and talented CPAN and Perl core developers who make "getting things done" progressively easier. They iterate relentlessly over the scaffolding of giants such that yesterday's mountains become molehills. And when I read through this year's proposed ambitions, I said "Yes, I want that, too!"

I won't even pretend I have the wherewithal to contribute programmatically or even strategically to the efforts described in this year's proposed projects. But I want the benefits that would come when any of those proposed efforts succeed, and those benefits will continue to fuel my enjoyment of Perl and facilitate my livelihood. So in lieu of being able to make my life easier with my own hands, investing a miniscule fraction of my lifetime Perl earnings to make earning with Perl even easier/more enjoyable/etc. seems like a great idea.

Also, Ron Savage served as a role model and made a private donation. It's always easier when someone else gets the ball rolling. :)

This week I will be starting the company promotion that I mentioned in my last blog post (https://blogs.perl.org/users/shadowcat_mdk/2015/03/perl-and-the-company-culture.html). I thought I would take a few moments to explain some more what I am doing and what the process will be.

As I said previously this is not a structured approach, there is no definite action or reward to be achieved and no…

A couple of recent events, and a long running conversation, have set me to thinking about all the companies who contribute to the world of Perl. When I say contribute I mean any, or multiple of the following:

1. Use Perl;
2. Have Perl developers;
3. Sponsor Perl events;
4. Send delegates to conferences;
5. Buy Perl services from consultants;
6. Sponsor development;
7. Release Code;
8. Sponsor a module creation;
9. Manage an event;
10. Host an event;
11. Encourage employees to be community members;
12. Allow …

Happy New Year!..

Oh my bad! I missed to post here that I made a Grant proposal.

It often happens. It obviously happens so obviously often during the last 15-20 years that the other day a guy (C# programmer) on Facebook commented: "CMS in Perl?!? "It will scale with your business" hahahaha". We obviously miss to say explicitly obvious things.

Yes, he does not know this is just a "Piece of cake" for us. Yes, it is so much "Piece of of cake" that almost nobody in the Perl community bothers to do it. Yeah, we have CPAN, we have CPANTESTERS, We have tied variables that some languages find very cool and trendy, and we even find them old fashioned, We are modern, we have Mo /o /se, ORMs and all the stuff, BUT "We suck at marketing".

OK, let us stop saying this and start doing things, the obvious things. Like writing a book for doomies, like a CMS (just using the acronym), as PHP community does. Like many CMSs, so many that when searching the web one can find more written in Perl than in ... some other languages.

I know we have enterprise-grade systems. I know. Everyone of us knows what he/she is doing at work what tremendous amounts of data Perl is capable to process. How it scales, how even amazingly stupid Perl code amazingly works, etc., etc...

Now, I am trying to mitigate/fix/repair (what's the word in English?) my mistake - the fact that I forgot to post here. There are five days or something left for the community to comment, let us help the Grants Committee to vote.

BEAUTIFUL. We should make the things to look beautiful. Why do we ignore so often this? Is there anyone who feels he is better designer than coder among us? Please come and help to make it beautiful. Go look over the web, steal ideas, inspiration... Suggest! I will do my best to find and choose one (why not two or more) default theme for the site area which does not suck. No, it must be beautiful. It should be so beautiful that... one decide to download Ado. (TODO: Write a tutorial about how to make/install themes in Ado) (WTF is this name? "Additional Day Off"? yes, no, see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ado)

EASY. We must make it easy to install/deploy. So easy that any casual kid (one of those who call them self programmers after making his first site with Joomla or WordPress) can enjoy it, using his cheap shared hosting account, managed by cPanel.

PROFESSIONAL. We must keep it professional, keeping clear the path to growth. That is why Ado is based on Mojolicious. That is why it can be split in modules, which can be installed from CPAN, automatically get test reports from http://www.cpantesters.org/. Setting and imposing rules. That is why we used Perl::Critic (and may be soon could switch to Perl::Lint) while developing.

TINY. We should keep it tiny -- just a wrapper -- and later use whatever we decide is helping us from CPAN to integrate trough our plugins.

I could as well base it on Dancer if several years a go I had chosen Dancer. You may choose Dancer for your simple-to-use-install-and-extend web-framework with-user-interface. Do it!

I applied for the grant to force my self to do it. With whatever help and deadly constructive criticism from you - the more the better.

I have posted a formal version of the Grants Committee 2014 report.

Here is another, a bit less formal and more personal version.

Here I am

I took over the position of the Grants Committee secretary at the beginning of this year. I wanted to try a lot of things, some of which went great, but others were challenging.

People change

Besides me,

• Daisuke Maki joined the committee as the first voting member from Japan. Perl community in Japan is often "invisible" and TPF is invisible in Japan due to the language barrier and he has been working hard to increase the visibility.
• Mark Jensen joined us as a grant manager. I am sure a number of you enjoy his grant updates already. Behind the scene, he spends good amount of time to help the grants run smoothly.

Grant rules change

• The grant evaluation is conducted every 2 months. It was quarterly until 2013.
• The grant limit was raised from $3,000 to $10,000.

Can't be a bad thing.

Challenge 1: Marketing

Our favorite topic. The grant program has to be more known. Our committee people tweeted and blogged. I spoke about the grant program in my local Perl Mongers meeting. The program was mentioned in multiple talks in YAPC. You may have seen our Google ads which I have been testing. But marketing is never enough.

Challenge 2: $$$

The grant program isn't possible without our sponsors. As the Grants Committee, one of the best ways to give back the value to the sponsors is to deliver grants successfully to advance the Perl language. We need to have more successful grants, which will lead to the sponsors' satisfaction and, in the long run, more sponsorship and more grants will be possible.

An interesting idea seems to be floating around the Internet ... creating a basic interactive website on how to contribute to a particular FLOSS project. After some noise on the Perl Monger Groups and Perl Propaganda lists I decided to help a few folks put together: http://whatcanidoforperl.org/ . You might have read something about it on Perl Weekly or not. If you have suggestions please create a ticket or better yet create a pull request here. Cheers!

At the end of the London Perl Workshop this year, we presented Mark Keating with a Silver Camel, to acknowledge everything he has done, and continues to do, for the Perl community, and particularly the UK Perl community.

Here's Mark shortly after being presented with his Silver Camel:

Photo by Wendy G.A. van Dijk

In case you're not familiar with Mark:

• He has been chief organiser of the London Perl Workshop since 2008
• He is co-founder and co-leader of North-West England Perl Mongers
• He's been involved in the Google Summer of Code
• He's director and secretary of the enlightened perl organisation
• He's chair of The Perl Foundation's marketing committee
• He's been a key player in the scheme to send newbies to conferences
• He's talked about Perl at non-Perl conferences
• His and Matt's company (Shadowcat) are long-term supporters of Perl