We are now 3 months old and growing fast every week with the support of wider Perl Community.
The prime motto of the “Perl Weekly Challenge” is to promote Perl (be it Perl5 or Perl6). I was looking for fun way of doing it. Being, co-editor of Perl Weekly newsletter, I noticed that not many people blog about interesting use of the language. I must say, Perl6 community is doing far better than Perl5. It is not that Perl5 community is not active. They are but only limited to Conferences and Workshops. So I thought of creating a platform to bring active members of Perl5 and Perl6 communities together to solve fun tasks. While doing so, I wanted to allow relatively new members of the community as well to participate the weekly challenge. Keeping this in mind, I came up with weekly challenge comprises of two tasks, one aimed for beginners and other for experts.
Since I always wanted to promote the language, I decided to encourgage members to blog about their solutions. I can see the affect of the weekly challenge, we now get on average 8-10 blog posts together for Perl5 and Perl6 every week. Each blog has its own style and teaches you something special every time. Please do checkout the dedicated GitHub repository and enjoy.
The best part of the Perl Weekly Challenge is that you get to know so many hidden talent from around the world. We use social platform like Twitter to start interesting dicussions and share our thoughts. If you are active on Twitter than please do join us.
Recently Pete Sergeant of PerlCareers came forward to sponsor the prize of Perl Weekly Challenge with reward of $50 Amazon voucher. It was first introduced in the “Perl Weekly Challenge - 013”. At the end, we got our first winner as “Laurent Rosenfeld”. The best part of his contribution is that he always solved the weekly challenges in both Perl5 and Perl6. He doesn’t just stop there, he even publishes detailed blog sbout it.
Please check out his recent contributions, CODE and BLOG.
Icing on the cake was when I noticed Damian Conway, wrote not one but three blog about the weekly challenges and how Perl6 can help you solve the tasks as listed below:
Some team members even suggest tasks for the week;y challenges. Recently, Neil Bowers, proposed very interesting task and blogged about it as I misunderstood the task initially.
We even introduced third task specifically related to creating perl interface to the popular API as suggested by Gabor Szabo. Although API task is optional, It is becoming fast popular among members that Neil Bowers even released a CPAN distribution WebService::WordsAPI in response to recent API task.
If you want to have fun and learn then do join the team by dropping a line to perlweeklychallenge@yahoo.com with your name, city and country. For more information, please check out FAQ page.
Last but not the least, I would like to thank each and every one for the support and encourgagement.
Keep contributing and sharing knowledge.