The CPAN Pull Request Challenge cpan-prc-org is a 12 month challenge where participants sign up to contribute to at least one (randomly allocated) CPAN module per month.

Started in 2015 by Neil B, the challenge was described as a “good way to help others, learn a bit more about CPAN, and talk to random people in the community” (NeilB:PR Challenge 2015).

Two CV-Library developers took part in the first challenge, myself (lancew) and diocles - see how we did CPAN PRC 2015.

It was fun exploring new code and finding ways to contribute, so I did it again last year…then I got to thinking, how about doing it as a team…so in 2017, we the CV-Library development team are all taking part!

CV-Library was founded in Perl and the vast majority of our code is still Perl, so this is a great opportunity to give back to the community which has contributed to the business and to our careers. It’s also an awesome way to improve as developers. Reading and contributing to Perl created outside of our team will expose us to new ways to do things and we will get the chance to work with office colleagues from other internal teams that we don’t always work with on a daily basis. Also we’re fairly sure that there will be pizza :)

This month (January) we have been allocated (at random) the Task::Biodiverse::NoGui module. Which is really interesting as “…spatial analysis of diversity using indices based on taxonomic, phylogenetic, trait and matrix-based (e.g. genetic distance) relationships…” is outside of our comfort zone!

We’ll be writing up how we do on a regular basis, so check back here to see how we get on.