Perl 5 Grant Application: Travel to QA Hackathon
Tue, 31-Jan-2012 by
Karen Pauley
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We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes.
Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org.
**Name**
Ricardo Signes
**Project Title**
Perl QA Hackathon 2012
Amount Requested: $900
**Synopsis**
This grant will be used to pay for travel for Ricardo Signes to and from the Perl QA Hackathon held in Paris in Q1 2012.
**Benefits to Perl 5**
I have attended three of the four Perl QA Hackathons (Oslo, Birmingham, Amsterdam) and have, at each of them, been able to contribute several solid work days of very productive work to the infrastructure behind the CPAN and related tools. Specifically, I was one of the chief implementors of the new CPAN Testers platform (Metabase) and built the Fake CPAN system for testing CPAN tools, and several reusable software libraries that are used to power both Metabase and Fake CPAN.
In 2012, I hope to continue some work performed with David Golden in 2011, refactoring PAUSE and adding more regression tests to it. PAUSE is the system which processes contributor uploads to the CPAN, manages CPAN contributor identity, and builds the CPAN indexes used by CPAN clients to locate libraries for installation.
In previous years, I also spent a significant amount of time working with other attendees on their contributions, and plan to do the same this year. This is one of the several reasons that attendance in person is incomparably superior to "virtual attendance."
**Deliverable Elements**
The QA Hackathon does not have a set agenda, so promising specific work product from it up front seems unwise. I have detailed, above, the sort of work that I am almost certain to do, however. Further, I will provide a public, written report of my activities at the Hackathon.
Any software that I produce will be released under the Perl 5 standard license terms.
**Applicant Biography**
I have been building software in Perl professionally for about twelve years. I am a frequent contributor of original software to the CPAN and a frequent contributor to, or maintainer of, other popular CPAN libraries. I am also a contributor to the core Perl 5 project, and its current project lead.
I have been the recipient of TPF grants twice before, both of which were completed promptly and successfully.
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Comments (9)
This looks like a good idea. The amount of the grant is very reasonable and the output of hackatons is always very useful for the community.
If his claims are true (no reason to doubt it), then this sounds like a good idea.
In the future, he should add the amount of days/hours he intends to commit.
The hackathon is three days, and in the past has been from about 9:00 to about 18:00, with a break for lunch. So, I'll be putting in about three eight hour days. That isn't 24 hours of programming, as there is overhead for asking for advice, doing design work, answering questions from other people, and so on.
In the past I've also gotten work done at night and on the flights, but I think of that as a bonus rather than something I'm committing to.
+1. I can think of no reason why this grant should be denied. The reasoning presented speaks for itself and is right and true.
I would like The Perl Foundation to approve this grant. I think that Ricardo's attendance at the hackathon will benefit Perl 5. Ricardo is the current Perl 5 Pumpking, and him meeting there in person with the key QA and toolchain developers to plan future work will be much more efficient than attempting to do this remotely, with a 6 hour timezone difference.
+1
I'd be happy to have this grant accepted and to see Rik at the QA hackathon. I find the QA hackathons to be very productive times due, in part, to having a critical mass of the right people all together in a room at once.
The legacy isn't as much about the code written during the event (although there is plenty of that) as it is about the discussions and decisions which are made which allow for direction and greater productivity in the weeks and months following. Rik's presence will only enhance that.
This seems reasonable, but I thought that historically TPF didn't fund travel grants.
+1 regardless.
Rik has been a huge contributor at past hackathons and his presence would be a huge help for this year's event. Additionally, while wearing his Pumpking hat, I would hope that we can collectively have some good group discussions about future direction for the toolchain in core.
