David Mertens

play-perl was only just announced, but I've already fallen in love with it. There seems to be some confusion about how it works, so I thought I would lend my interpretation. Note that I did not write it nor am I affiliated with it, but I think it's awesome and want to get people using it!

If you're like me, you have a lot of ideas floating around in your head for open source projects. Mine tend to be oriented towards computational science, but it could be anything. And, if you're like me, a big part of your open source experience centers on making others happy by helping them solve their problems. The question naturally arises: among all your random ideas, what would be the best thing to work on? What will make the most people happy if you complete it? Should you write a blog entry explaining a feature, or add a new feature?

Enter play-perl.org. There are two basic things you do on this site once you've registered. First, dump all your ideas into open quests. When you do this, you are asking others on play-perl what they would like to see done. Second, read through others' ideas and "like" stuff that you would like to see done.

And that's it! It's really quite simple.

The service is brand new and it will eventually become too big with its present form. Hopefully new features will arise, such as being able to add tags to quests so that people can filter others' quests on tags. Maybe I'll even dig around play-perl's source and try to add that functionality. But it's not a problem for now, as it's so new.

-Ofun