This post is mostly geared towards Perl 6 newbies who plan to attend the Perl 6 Hackathon at the Swiss Perl Workshop 2015 in Olten, on Thursday, 27 August 2015.

First and foremost: Don’t be shy and come even if you have never contributed to the Perl 6 ecosystem. Neither have I, and I will be there. There are always tasks that do not require insights into the Perl 6 toolchain. This hackathon is pretty much a one-time opportunity for Switzerland. There will be a dozen of Perl 6 core hackers on site, and some of them will even help you get Perl 6 up and running.

Please add yourself to the list of attendees. We will then organise a seat and food for you. On the link mentioned, you will also find extensive information and links to preparational material. (Thank you, Wendy!) Most of the text below is copied from there.

Get prepared. Instead of showing up and asking around what to do, you should pick possible tasks in beforehand. A good hook would be to check the Perl 6 status of things you use in Perl 5 and start from there. You could even become one of the first Perl 6 module authors on the topic chosen!

If you can you could also consider some time travelling forward to the Perl 6 training sessions on Saturday, then back and forth to many interesting Perl 6 talks on Friday and Saturday, and then back to the Hackathon on Thursday.

There will be several people that help to install Perl 6. Some of the regular Perl 6 people have been doing a "Perl 6 Installation Hour" before. If you want to, you can install Perl 6 (especially Rakudo Star, the most advanced implementation of Perl 6):

http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/

For some, the best page for people using Linux/BSD/Debian, to install Perl 6 Rakudo:

https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew

(You should not time-travel and install some fantastic Perl 6.22 from 2042(?), because that would probably confuse some core hackers, or probably you should..)

The core Perl 6 developers will work on core Perl 6 code. But they will be available for "less important things" and most of them really don't mind helping out with small things, like "my installation of Perl 6 does not work as expected and I have no clue where to start fixing it".

A couple of things that people can work on:

* Documentation ( http://www.perl6.org/documentation/ ).

* Convert modules from Perl 5 to use in Perl 6 (see also http://doc.perl6.org/language/5to6 ; also check Stefan Seifert's Inline::Perl5 on https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5 ; check David Adler's activities on http://dhaperl6.blogspot.nl/ ; check DrForr's project on http://blogs.perl.org/users/drforr/2015/07/perltoperl6-released-to-cpan.html and https://github.com/drforr/Perl-Mogrify ).

* Check the testing system, and add more tests ( see also https://github.com/perl6/roast ).

* Add more examples to Rosetta Code (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Perl_6 ), or maybe improve them.

* Invite people to visit #perl6 on irc.freenode.org where the people are busy, friendly and helpful (backlog is available too: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/ ).

There are at least two important aspects that need a lot of attention for Perl 6 to become a success:

* IO

* graphics support

There is also a list of most wanted modules that need a lot of attention:

https://github.com/perl6/perl6-most-wanted/blob/master/most-wanted/modules.md

So, looking forward to seeing you there!

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