According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster, “craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than a decade. craigslist Charitable Fund is honored to recognize the wizardry and generosity of the Perl community, help ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl5, and contribute to the future evolution of Perl.” He added, “It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it.”

For more information download the PDF Press Releases, or view the news story.

Registration will close on January 31st, 2012, so signup sooner rather than later.

You can also propose other people who should be invited. As with past years, they aim to fund the travel and accommodation costs for those who cannot otherwise get funding.

Sponsors required

Sponsoring the event is not reserved to organizations and corporations:if you think the Hackathon is useful to the Perl community, but cannot attend yourself, you can still contribute to the success of the event by making a donation. Even small donations will help and would be greatly appreciated.

The prize has been provided by the Enlightened Perl Organisation

The deadline is the 13th of January 2012, so make sure to have your laptop with you over the holiday season.

For more information visit http://contest.metacpan.org/ or see the entries so far.

Following their donation of $10,000 in the summer, Booking.com have made another donation towards the future development of Perl. This time the donation is for €100,000. Perl Foundation president Karen Pauley and former Perl 5 Pumpking Jesse Vincent are travelling to Amsterdam where they will accept the donation.

More details and a press release will be available on the Perl Foundation web site later.

The challenge was to build an application in 30 hours, using open data and open source tools. Of the 47 teams and only one of them used Perl, .

View their entry or read more about the event.

Perl Weekly is a curated newsletter sent out once a week, on Monday morning (European time). It contains 10-15 links to the most interesting Perl related news and blog posts of the previous week, each with a few lines of comment that help the reader know what can be expected from the link.

It is especially aimed at people who want to keep an eye on the development in Perl, CPAN and the Perl community in general but who don’t have time to read all the news items, blogs and tweets the Perl community generates.

Subscribe to the Perl Weekly newsletter yourself to find out more.

The full source code to Perl Nights will be available in the Castle Blueprints section once the beta period is over and all features are complete and bug free.

The API is already powering new features in Padre, the Perl IDE as well as an iPhone CPAN app – iCPAN and github meets CPAN website.

There have been a large number of contributors and an ever increase set of features.

Olaf looks back at a few of the more recent updates.

There are still a large number of issues and features which the project wants to add, and they are are always looking for more Volunteers.

Congratulations to all involved.

The site focuses on code review and discussions, with the goal of helping module authors get feedback, suggestions and help before they upload a new module to CPAN.

This is a really interesting idea and is getting lots of use even after having been live for only a couple of days. There are several changes and additions planned for the future, so this is definitely a site to keep an eye on.