Neil Bowers had started CPAN Pull Request Challenge in January 2015. Participants received a CPAN module as their assignment each month. The goal was to submit pull requests. I joined the challenge right away. Here’s how it went.

2015: Warming Up

My last semester at Bogazici University in Istanbul started February of this year. I moved to California for grad school in September.

I’ve completed my assignments in January and February before taking a long pause (and a long flight). I’ve joined back for October and November. 6 PRs for 4 repos, only 1 merged. All were either documentation updates or configuration changes.

2015	Jan	Documentation	CLOSED	Exporter-Declare
2015	Jan	Documentation	MERGED	Exporter-Declare
2015	Feb	Config	OPEN	Dancer-Plugin-Auth-Basic
2015	Oct	Config	OPEN	HTML-FormHandler-Model-DBIC
2015	Oct	Config	OPEN	HTML-FormHandler-Model-DBIC
2015	Nov	Documentation	OPEN	HTML-StickyQuery-DoCoMoGUID

2016: See if I can fix this

I graduated from Santa Cruz and relocated to Santa Monica for ZipRecruiter. This was my first job, excluding some internships I did back at Istanbul. Attended my first Perl Conference in June in Orlando.

Like in 2015, I did my assignments only for 4 months. This time I tried to fix some failing tests too. Results were great: 4 PRs, 4 merged!

2016	Jun	Documentation	MERGED	HiD
2016	Oct	Test	MERGED	Catalyst-Controller-Validation-DFV
2016	Nov	Test	MERGED	BenchmarkAnything-Storage-Frontend-Lib
2016	Dec	Test	MERGED	Monitoring-Livestatus

2017: More Pull Requests

This year was fun: I completed 8 assignments with 13 PRs with 7 merged. It was a mix of documentation, configuration, test fixes and new functions. We have started to get “team assignments” for ZipRecruiter as well, which is not included in this post.

2017	Jan	Config	MERGED	Devel-ebug
2017	Feb	Function	MERGED	Log-Dispatch
2017	Mar	Function	MERGED	Mail-Builder
2017	Mar	Test	MERGED	Mail-Builder
2017	May	Function	MERGED	AnyEvent-WebSocket-Client
2017	Jun	Config	OPEN	Net-Proxy
2017	Jul	Test	CLOSED	Class-Inspector
2017	Jul	Config	MERGED	Class-Inspector
2017	Aug	Config	OPEN	App-p
2017	Aug	Documentation	OPEN	App-p
2017	Aug	Config	OPEN	App-p
2017	Aug	Function	OPEN	App-p
2017	Oct	Function	MERGED	AnyEvent-Filesys-Notify

2018: This is the end

Neil let us know that this will be the end of CPAN Pull Request Challenge. I was able to complete my assignment only for 5 months with 6 PRs and 4 merged.

I gave talks about CPAN Pull Request Challenge & Pull Request Club in two conferences. Salt Lake City (Perl Conference in NA) and Glasgow (Perl Conference in EU). We also had BOF (Birds of Feather) events for pull requests in both venues. Many people, whom I am thankful for, had showed up and contributed to open source. Some people submitted their first public PR, which made it a magical moment.

2018	Jan	Config	MERGED	Net-DHCP
2018	Feb	Config	MERGED	Alien-LibGumbo
2018	Aug	Config	MERGED	Text-CSV
2018	Oct	Documentation	CLOSED	Data-DPath
2018	Nov	Documentation	OPEN	Vim-Debug
2018	Nov	Config	MERGED	Text-MediawikiFormat

Did you see a pattern? I never missed any October! This is all thanks to Hacktoberfest.

Total Stats

I played with this data a little, and out came an interesting result: I’ve got 56% merge rate. This goes way up to 80% for function/test changes, and down to 29% for documentation. Here’s all numbers.

	Config	Doc	Function	Test	TOTAL
Open	6	3	1	-	10
Closed	-	2	-	1	3
Merged	6	2	4	4	16
TOTAL	12	7	5	5	29

And here is a breakdown by status (open, closed or merged), for each type (config, doc, etc). Each column adds up to 100%.

	Config	Doc	Function	Test	All Types
Open	50%	42%	20%	-	34%
Closed	-	29%	-	20%	10%
Merged	50%	29%	80%	80%	56%

Thanks

Thanks a lot to Neil Bowers for organizing the challenge and inspiring many people. Thanks a lot to all participants for keeping it alive. Thank you for reading!

If you were a participant of CPAN-PRC and want to keep going, give Pull Request Club a try. We currently have 14 participants and 120 repos ready for a match.