Crossposted from blogs.perl.org.

Hi everyone, this is my first blog post on here (Gabor Szabo++ for reminding me that I need to blog!). Last week, I posted to the Houston.pm group inviting them to come out to the local City of Houston Open Innovation Hackathon.

I was planning on attending since I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago, but I saw this also as an opportunity to build cool things in Perl and show what Perl can do.

To those that don't interact much with the Perl community, Perl is completely invisible or just seen in the form of short scripts that do a single task. Showing people by doing is a great way to demonstrate how much Perl has progressed in recent years with all tools that have been uploaded to CPAN and that Perl systems can grow beautifully beyond 1,000 SLOC.

Going to hackathons like these also make for a great way to network with the local technology community and see what type of problems they are interested in solving. I would love to see what type of approaches they take in their technology stack and whether those approaches can be adapted and made Perlish.