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CPAN.io is the brainchild of BOOK and NEILB. The idea came up during one of our extended IRC sessions (extended in the sense that we seem to pick up the conversation where it left off, sometimes with a few days between each utterance).
We had been talking a lot about gamification, and the success of the once-a-week game (started by MARKF, with a first leaderboard by CJM), and were looking for something to work on together at the Perl QA Hackathon in Lyon.
And so, during one of our IRC sessions, in the days leading up to the Perl QA Hackathon, on 2014-03-11 (times in GMT, transcript slightly edited for brevity and readability):
23:18 <neilb> Seems to be some enthusiasm for the dashboard. Maybe a good focus point for several things at the QAH
23:18 <BooK> yes
23:23 <BooK> let's set some goals for the week-end...
23:24 <BooK> - set it as a static site, generated periodically
23:24 <BooK> - pick up a nice domain name
23:25 <BooK> - announce it by the end of the hackathon, so it's picked up by gabor for his next newsletter
23:25 <BooK> - I'd like to do the yearly leaderboards for once-a-week
23:25 <neilb> you're talking about the dashboard? Or the once-a-week, or everything?! :-)
23:26 <BooK> (dash|leader)board are just two sides of the same coin
23:26 <BooK> it's just that the game aspect is shining more on one side
23:27 <neilb> interesting that mainly different people have engaged with the dashboard vs the leaderboard
23:27 <BooK> and I think the once-a-week can be part of the play-cpan
23:27 <BooK> PlayPAN ?
23:28 <neilb> I quite like the PlayPAN name, but my one reservation is that it doesn't have the 'CPAN' name in it. Would hopefully be a .perl.org name, which makes the perl link clear, I guess.
23:29 <BooK> play.cpan.org or dash.cpan.org would be awesome to have
23:42 <BooK> it's annoying that "play perl" was taken already
23:42 <BooK> questhub is a very good name
23:42 <BooK> did you know that cpan.io is free?
23:42 <BooK> I mean, available
23:43 <neilb> ooh, no. Hadn't thought about a different domain. Figured the SEO juice from a .perl.org would make that the right choice
23:44 <BooK> actually, a bunch of the cpan.* domains are available
23:47 <neilb> could then have neilb.cpan.io for my dashboard, book.cpan.io for yours, etc!
23:48 <BooK> yup
23:48 * neilb likes that
23:48 <BooK> and the .io has some "data feed" feel to it
23:50 * BooK is actually ready to click on "buy"
23:50 * neilb just checked whether anyone has the pause id WWW
23:50 <BooK> hehehe
23:54 <BooK> ok, are we settled on the name? I've entered my CC info, so it's really one click away now
23:57 <neilb> Well, I'm sure we can come up with something to do with cpan.io, even if it's not this...
23:57 <neilb> do it! do it!
23:57 <BooK> done
00:05 <neilb> awesome
And so, on 2014-03-11 BOOK bought the cpan.io domain name. During
the hackathon, we worked on yet another CPAN leaderboard
generator. And then, life took over,
and all went quiet...
Until CPAN Day!
Actually, CPAN Day also came out of one of our IRC sessions, on 2014-06-04 (times in GMT, transcript slightly edited for brevity and readability):
08:23 <BooK> * kentnl proposes a once-an-hour score table just to see what happens
08:23 <neilb> heh, was that mentioned on some IRC channel?
08:24 <BooK> yup
08:24 <BooK> #distzilla a few hours ago
08:25 <BooK> actually, we should run it to see who has the longest chain, and maybe run the contest on CPAN day
08:25 <BooK> which means... create a CPAN Day!
08:25 <neilb> "CPAN day"?
08:25 <BooK> there's a talk like a pirate day, a towel day, a Tau day
08:25 <BooK> why not a CPAN day ?
08:26 <BooK> needs some preparation, like what should Perl programmers do on CPAN day
08:26 <BooK> but that could be a nice thing to do
08:26 <neilb> yeah: fix bugs, update SEE ALSO, report a bug / wishlist, email thanks to other CPAN authors
08:32 * BooK reads perlhist in search for a suitable table
08:32 <BooK> date
08:32 <neilb> with enough notice we could try sell people on the idea of "fix at least one bug", and try and seriously bring down the total number of bugs on CPAN.
08:33 <BooK> Larry 5.000 1994-Oct-17
08:33 <BooK> actually, there's also the date of the first upload to CPAN itself
08:34 <neilb> that's a good day to use!
08:34 <BooK> that's still somewhat in the future (August ?)
08:42 <BooK> that would give us a deadline for CPAN.io
08:43 <neilb> yeah, I'll dig out the specific dist and date later
08:43 <neilb> unless you have it to hand?
08:47 <BooK> no
08:49 <neilb> oldest = A/AN/ANDK/Symdump-1.20.tar.gz, released Wed Aug 16 14:12:18 1995
With NEILB starting to spread the word about CPAN Day, blogging daily about things to do on the day, BOOK decided it was a good time to actually start doing something with CPAN.io.
We have lots of ideas for the site and the game boards... Come play the CPAN game with us, fork cpan.io on github and send us patches and feature requests.