nysus has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Over the upcoming Christmas break, I want to give my kid some direct insight into open source development and the process of software development. He may never end up being a software developer, but I'm thinking he should at least know the fundamentals and the tools involved in the process that is a big factor in our world.

And now that I have finally learned myself how to contribute a CPAN module, I thought having him, under his name, contribute a module that anyone could download and modify would help get him excited.

I don't want to pollute CPAN with something completely useless. So I'm wondering if anyone had a good idea for a simple module that did something fairly trivial but useful. He's into PC games and games on Steam and is big into League of Legends (which I know very little about). Maybe it could be related to that where it scrapes some info of the web and emails updates or something like that.

Any thoughts or ideas are greatly appreciated!

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

  • Comment on Good CPAN project to give my kid some insight into development process?

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Re: Good CPAN project to give my kid some insight into development process?
by 1nickt (Canon) on Dec 16, 2017 at 21:23 UTC

    You don't have to put everything in the CPAN. Plenty of open source software projects in Perl are not on CPAN. Just host it on Github in a public repo. CPAN is not for hosting vanity or personal projects.

    Also, it's good practice to discuss your ideas for a module on the Prepan before publishing them to the CPAN, and on other more focused media as appropriate, eg in #dancer if you are considering a Dancer plugin. You might get valuable feedback or code review.


    The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
[reply]
[d/l]

      Good point. Yeah, I guess CPAN is kind of my own Holy Grail. Publishing to GitHub is good enough. Not sure a 14 year old would get excited about CPAN, anyway. And never heard of Prepan. Will check it out. Thanks!

      $PM = "Perl Monk's";
      $MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
      $nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
      Click here if you love Perl Monks

[reply]
Re: Good CPAN project to give my kid some insight into development process?
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 16, 2017 at 19:17 UTC
    Ask kid what he thinks would be cool not strangers
[reply]

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