CPAN Day (August 16th, UTC) is nearly here. Someone asked me what the goals are, if any, for CPAN Day. When BOOK came up with the idea, we both thought it was an opportunity to celebrate CPAN, but also a chance to reflect on how we got here, and to think about how we can keep driving it forward.

I also saw it as an opportunity to bang on my curation drum — give everyone ideas for how they might improve their distributions, or those of others, and in doing so improve the overall quality of CPAN.

CPAN was created by us, for us, so do whatever feels right to you.

If you do something for CPAN Day, please tweet about it with the #cpanday hashtag.

Goals

The main goal is to have some fun doing CPAN-related things, but in the process there are a few records I wonder if we might break:

The most releases done in a single day was 150, on 13th June 2012.

The most authors who released in a single day was 74, on 24th November 2009.

The most neocpanisms in a single day was 41, on 22nd November 2012. A neocpanism is the first upload of a new CPAN distribution.

The most releases in a month is 2427, in May 2013. As I write this, there have been 1250 releases in August so far. We're not going to beat the record tomorrow, but maybe we can push ourselves a lot closer.

Things to do

If you've already released things to CPAN, here's a list of suggestions for things you might consider doing on CPAN Day:

If you haven't uploaded anything to CPAN yet, then this is a perfect day to start. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it doesn't need to satisfy any of the points above — you can do those later.

Other things you could do on CPAN Day:

A final reminder: CPAN time is UTC, not your local time.

Have fun!