Frequently Asked Questions

Catalyzed.org was started to bring some new exposure to Perl and Catalyst in a way that is friendly to both those in the Perl community and those who are new to it.

Our purpose is well summed up on our about page:

"We want to cover the exciting things that people are doing in Perl, in Catalyst, and all the many other major modules that have and are revolutionizing the way Perl programming is done.  We want to show just how much vitality is in the Perl world.  We want to cover the success stories and talk to the people who are using Perl on a daily basis. "


Who works on Catalyzed.org?

Catalyzed.org is a combination volunteer and sponsored site.  The site is managed and handled by a group of volunteers, with Ionzero providing organizational and financial support for hosting and sponsored articles.



Where do you get your article ideas?

Our article ideas come from the community.  Anyone is welcome to suggest an idea.  We are looking for article ideas, posts, sites to track and screencasts that may be of interest to the Perl community at large.  You can suggest an idea by visiting http://catalyzed.ideascale.com/ or email us at:  ideas at catalyzed org



Who writes the articles?

Volunteers mainly.  People who want the site to be successful and we want to make things more available to the community.  We love articles that people volunteer to write.  If you have a personal favorite project or an idea for a relevant article, or want to write one of the ones that is listed on our idea pages, please get in touch!



What's up with 'sponsored articles?'

We want to provide interesting and useful information to the community and to that end, we are willing to put our money where our mouth is.  Ionzero has pledged to sponsor articles / howtos and screencasts that the catalyzed.org team find interesting and/or ideas that have a fair amount of interest on our idea pages.  We will also accept donations toward sponsoring certain articles if you or your organization are interested in anything in particular.  Keep in mind that we are a small organization, and we focus on volunteer efforts because we do not have deep pockets.  That said, however, our whole reason for being is to improve our community and if you are interested in writing an article but need a bit more than love to make it happen, we are still interested.  For those who want to sponsor or be sponsored,  contact ideas at catalyzed org.



Why not just post on [insert site here]?

Quite frankly, we have higher ambitions.  We have seen many sites come and go, sometimes contributed to, sometimes not. We have seen people with great plans that wind up being subject to so much argument and bikeshedding that they never get off the ground.   We have purpose, we have a vested interest in the goal, and no-one else quite covers what we want to do.  So we decided the best way to ensure our efforts were not lost was to JFDI (Just fscking do it).

We do not want to replace all the other sites.  We want to add to their number.  We want to direct people to them where appropriate and in general we want to be a central point where people can find new articles related to Catalyst and Perl as well as links to other interesting sites and resources.  We want cross-pollination and if you run another site and would like to work with us on this, get in touch.  ideas at catalyzed org



Are you covering Perl 6?

Only insofar as it is relevant to current production-capable development.  We, like many others, have an eye on Perl6, but we work day to day in Perl 5 version 8+ and so we are focused there.   There is a lot of back-porting and, ahem, borrowing of ideas from Perl 6 going on and some of those endeavors are of great interest to us.  



What about frameworks aside from Catalyst?

Most of the volunteers at Catalyzed.org work with Catalyst daily, so it is of particular interest to us.  That said, we don't believe that every good idea will originate within our favored project.  We are dedicated to covering what is of interest to the wider Perl community and so any system, module or framework may be covered here.  We are inclusionary and are not interested in 'my framework is better than yours' type debates, but we are interested in covering the state of the art regardless of where it originates.


I have another question...

Great.  Get in touch.  ideas at catalyzed org