The Perl QA Hackathon 2014 in Lyon is over

By BooK on March 23, 2014 2:00 PM

(A shorter version of this post has been sent as a thank-you email to our sponsors.)

The Perl QA Hackathon in Lyon has ended last Sunday. According to the participants, it was a great success. They know, as well as the organisers, that we could never have made it without the support of our sponsors. We would like to thank them again for their help. Perl and CPAN come out better and stronger of these four days of hacking and talking.

Tina Müller is organising the next edition of the Perl QA Hackathon in Berlin in 2015. We hope she and our sponsors will be in touch in the future. :-) And also that this post will inspire new sponsors to support an event that has become a yearly milestone for Perl and CPAN.

Rather than badly paraphrasing what the participants had to say, I'll simply pass only some significant quotes from their blogs, on the topics that are relevant to sponsors past and future.

What is the Perl QA Hackathon, and why it's a great event to have

The QA Hackathon is a small, tightly-focused event where the programmers currently doing work on the CPAN toolchain get together to get a lot of work done and to collaborate in ways that simply aren't possible for most of the rest of the year. I always come out of it feeling refreshed and invigorated, partly because I feel like I get so much done and partly because it's such an inspiration to see so many other people getting even more done all in one place.

-- Ricardo Signes, Perl 5 Pumpking and prolific CPAN author

The QA Hackathon is a gathering with the purpose of improving Perl's toolchain, testing infrastructure, and other bits surrounding language development and usage. At it's core is an incredibly friendly and intelligent group of people, and I always leave the conference feeling reinvigorated and motivated to get things done (and with a much larger todo list than I had going in...)

-- Matthew Horsfall, XS champion and maintainer of Devel::PPPort

The QA hackathon is like the best conference "hallway track" mashed up with a coding marathon with some of the most incredibly talented hackers in the Perl community.

-- David Golden, prolific CPAN author, including many toolchain and key core modules

The big value of the QA Hackathon is that brings together 30 or so people who care about Perl, CPAN and the toolchain, and hothouses them for 3, or in this case 4, days. Some people came with very specific things to work on, and did so very diligently. But there were lots of ideas bouncing around, leading to new things, all generally good for Perl. And so often when problems came up, people who could help were right there. I went with some very specific things I wanted to discuss, and a too-long-list of things to try and get done. I went off-piste quite a lot, but have come away with a long todo list that I'm fired up to get working on.

-- Neil Bowers, CPAN curation enthusiast

The amount of work I was able to remove from my MetaCPAN TODO list and the amount of knowledge I was able to glean from a room full of smart people have me convinced that my time at the Hackathon was well spent. Getting funded to attend something like this forces you to take it quite seriously, since you're there on someone else's dime.

-- Olaf Alders, MetaCPAN originator and project lead

I now have several pieces of work to continue with, some for a few months to come, but these 4 days have been extremely productive. Despite playing with the CPAN Testers databases rather than writing code, the discussions have been invaluable. Plus it's always great to catch up with everyone.

-- Barbie, CPAN Testers project lead

Having four uninterrupted days for hacking is a great benefit and a very pleasant change. But, to my mind, the main advantage of the QA hackathon is being with people who are working on similar things. Working together we are far more than the sum of the parts, and I try to ensure that I spend as much time as necessary talking and planning and designing. Coding can come later if necessary. [...] I find the QA hackathon to be an extremely important event. It motivates and drives progress over the coming year and beyond.

-- Paul Johnson, Devel::Cover author

Thank you to all of the sponsors for making this event possible

I was able to attend the 2014 Perl QA Hackathon because of the donations of the generous sponsors and the many donors to The Perl Foundation, which paid for my travel.

-- Ricardo Signes

I'm grateful to our sponsors for making this possible. They're done a huge service to the Perl community by providing the funds required to make something like this possible.

-- Olaf Alders

I want remind readers that each year, the QA hackathon happens because of the dedicated volunteer work of the organizers and the financial support of sponsors. [...] All our sponsors deserve great thanks! These companies are putting their money where their mouth is to make the Perl ecosystem better for everyone. Thank you, also, to my fellow participants. You're the reason I keep going back.

-- David Golden

This year's QA Hackthon was great, and it wouldn't have been possible without [...] all the other sponsors for helping to make the QA Hackathon the great success it was.

-- Barbie

Thank you to the sponsors; I couldn't have gone without their support.

-- Neil Bowers

I hope to be fortunate enough to attend the QA Hackathon again next year. [...] I'd also like to thank our sponsors, without you this wouldn't be possible.

-- Matthew Horsfall