When I first announced the Pull Request Challenge in late 2014, I expected a dozen or so people would sign up, we'd do some pull requests in 2015 (fixing bugs and improving docs), and that would be that. It's deeply satisfying that we're in our 3rd year, and so far over 1100 assignments have been given out, with pull requests done on more than 850 different CPAN distributions. This year we've got our first group taking part, from CV Library, and they're awesome.

Every month their team is assigned a new CPAN distribution, just like individual participants. Their dev team gets together one evening for pizza, and then works on their assigned distribution.

This month (March), they were assigned Linux::Unshare, an XS module. If you read their blog post, you'll see that they started off learning about XS modules, then had people looking into the outstanding RT issue, setting up TravisCI, etc. They ended up not only fixing the bug, but demonstrating the fix with Travis.

So their dev team is bonding over pizza, learning about Perl and CPAN together, sharing knowledge and best practice, and contributing back to CPAN to boot! How cool is that?

It would be great to see some more teams signing up and blogging about it. All you need to do is set up a github account for your team and a contact email address. Let me know those and you're off.

If you're not part of a Perl development team, you could still sign up: just email me (neil at bowers dot com) with your github username.

Read about the CV Library team's work so far: January, February, and March. CV Library are hiring, if you want to join that team.

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