I have been postponing this week’s Perl post mostly because our monthly Perl 6 Mongers meeting was yesterday. I brought up and did some initial planning for a monthly Rakudo / Perl 6 mini hackathon. I have an outline of events but I want to discuss the Dallas.p6m meeting briefly first.

fRew was going to give a lightning talk about Perl 6’s object model but had to postpone due to a lack of preparation. We are all getting to know each other well and the conversations covered the spectrum: from Guido’s Simplification Of Choice to Perl 6’s attributes and then finally to processing.org’s Javascript framework.

Lastly, I brought up the idea of having monthly mini-hackathons. I thought it would be a great way to put Patrick’s talk into practice. So the initial idea is to have a 2-hour hackathon two weeks after the Dallas.p6m (second Tuesday every month), which should be the last Saturday in the month. The first get-together will be focused on Patrick’s talk, with others expanding as people find new areas of interest. That means the first mini-hackathon is slated for August 29th and here’s what I have tenatively planned:

1. Introductions
2. Getting and building Rakudo
3. Running Rakudo
4. Mailing Lists / Ecosystem
5. Understanding RT
6. Test Suite access and explanation
7. Setting

We may or may not be able to cover all of that. Patrick seems confident that we will be able to cover these topics so I am fairly happy with the layout. There will be more details forthcoming about the venue and the time/date.

I’ve never been to or held an event like a mini-hackathon, so I’d love to hear suggestions.