I want to launch a new website for the Perl community.

I'd say it's a social network, but the main purpose and the main measure of its success is getting stuff done.

I'd say it's a todo-list, but I want the list of tasks to be public and people-oriented, not project-oriented.

Oh, and it's also going to be gamified.



It's not ready yet. I have some code and a pretty consistent development pace, and I think it's a doable project, and I think I need co-developers and early adopters to succeed.

But first, a bit of the backstory...

The story so far

In the June of this year, I was going to start the big Ubic 2.0 refactoring. Then came July and August, and I still was preparing to start coding. It's not that I didn't have enough time, I'm just lazy and procrastinate a lot.

So, as a true procrastinator, I went meta and got this idea of a gamified system that would remind me that people care about what I do and motivate me and other people to do stuff.

I soon figured out I probably couldn't do it alone, so I organized the hackathon at Yandex, recruited ~7 people for one day in September, and we put together the foundation of the project. We didn't do much in one day, but it forced us to think a lot about the underlying concepts, to write a text explaining my vision, and to build the infrastructure optimized for contributing.

What's happening now

I hacked on Play Perl on my own since the hackathon. (Except for the couple of weeks when I got robbed and beaten up in Moscow streets at night, and had to spend some time dealing with that...)

I'm a newbie in the frontend technologies world, but Bootstrap and Backbone.js are cool and easy to use. I wrote a release plan today with the list of features that need to be completed before launch, and I estimate that even with my current pace of half-hour per day I can do it in 2-3 months.



Contributors are welcome

If you'll read the design draft , you'll see that there's a long, long roadmap ahead. Long... and pretty cool if done right.So if you got this far and think this project is interesting, there's a lot of fun to be done :)I'm usually available on #play-perl at irc.perl.org, via email at me@berekuk.ru , and, obviously, at github issues

Some technical details:

Thanks to Vagrant, the code is really easy to obtain and run on any platform!

It uses Perl Dancer, MongoDB, Twitter Bootstrap, Backbone.js and Ubic.

