Welcome to the first weekly recap of “Perl Weekly Challenge”.

Apology for the delay, I was supposed to release this blog with the second challenge of the series. I promise next blog is going to be on time.

For the first time ever, the Monday 25th March 2019, was not depressing like any other Monday. Thanks to “Perl Weekly Challenge”, I was so busy following public reactions on Twitter. It was a memorable experience. We had our first solution even before I had my first coffee of the day. Guess who submitted the very first solution?

It was by Simon Proctor. Not only he shared the solutions but by afternoon he even blogged about it. I had another surprise on the day was by Lars Balker. I just loved his solutions.

There were few other surprises as well. Big shots like, Neil Bowers, Dave Cross, Philippe Bruhat, JJ Merelo participated in the first challenge. Dave Cross even blogged about it. Philippe Bruhat sent me the detailed solution by email. I couldn’t resist to make that as a blog for others to benefit from his knowledge.

I met Dave Jacoby on Twitter and found him very creative in his tweats but never knew he is such a great blogger. If you read his blog, you will understand what I mean. He explains every little things with so ease that any layman can understand.

Few days later, Joelle Maslak joined the party. The one and only girl in the team as of today, if I am not mistaken.

I am really thankfull to each and everyone for coming forward and encouraging. For the first time, I am doing something like this big. A day before the launch, Gabor Szabo, announced the Twitter handle @PerlWChallenge of the “Perl Weekly Challenge”.

How can I miss, Kivanc Yazan, the founder of “Pull Request Club”. He also participated in the first challenge. Then there was Alexey Melezhik, creator of Sparrow, joined the team as well.

A very good friend of mine, Laurent Rosenfeld, author of the book “Think Perl6” joined the team and contributed beautiful solutions. Not only that he even blogged about it.

I am really surprised by the amount of experience some of the team members have. With so many experts around, I am sure we would all get benefitted.

At the time of launch, I did not have clear plan how I am going to organise the solutions submitted by the team members. By mid week, I decided why not create a dedicated GitHub repository and keep all the solutions there. There are at least 2 benefits from this.

members can improve their solutions any time they can even submit their solution as PR rather than email

We are already in the second week and I have noticed, Pull Request is becoming the preferred choice. I am not complaining either.

The first member of the team was Veesh Goldman. Being an Indian by birth, I was so happy to see Perl hackers from India in the team. My expectation was lot more than this. I am still hopefull, with time more will join.

Here is list of blogs about the launch challenge. I must confess, just reading the blog would enlighten you so many new ideas. I have been doing Perl5 for more than 20 years now, still I found so many new interesting techniques. Since I have only recently started learning Perl6, I enjoyed Perl6 solutions as well. I highly recommend each of the listed blog. You will find plenty to learn from it.

It is practically not possible to list all the solutions. However you can take a look at the repository.

Last but not the least, keep sharing your solutions and thanks for making it so fun and enjoyable.