Perl Advent Calendar 2026 CFP

You are cordially invited to write an article for the 2026 Perl Advent Calendar.

The CFP is open until 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday October 15th.

What’s all this about then?

As an advent calendar author you will write one entry on a module of your choosing that will be revealed to the world on The Perl Advent Calendar on a given day of Advent (between the 1st and 24th of December 2026 inclusive).

The Perl Advent Calendar welcomes diverse author submissions from all types of Perl programmers. It is our firm belief that every Perl programmer, no matter how advanced or how novice, has a favorite Perl module they want to tell the world about. You can write about your own module or someone else’s. Write about whatever gets you in the mindset of the season.

The Perl Advent Calendar seeks to be an inclusive project. We encourage and sincerely welcome articles from authors of color, women, queer article authors, transgender authors and from other communities not well represented in the tech world. We do not discriminate on the basis of religion (yes, that means you can write a Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Solstice, Wintereenmas, or Agnostica article if you want.) Our Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct governs our interactions in the project.

The Perl Advent Calendar believes that the pool of authors should not be limited to people who have English as their first language. Authors who speak English as a second language are encouraged to submit. Each article submission undergoes an editorial process which assists those authors who may need help with their writing.

In order to participate in the Perl Advent Calendar please create an issue on GitHub to submit your chosen module and a brief description of your article (which need be no more than two or three sentences) by no later than 11:59 PM EDT Thursday October 15th 2026. If you don’t have an idea for an article but would be open to some suggestions or coming up with an article idea later on, just say so in the submission!

We look forward to hearing from you!

Timelines

• 11:59 PM EDT Thursday October 15th 2026: Deadline for article proposal submission.

• Acceptances are handled on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis. We review and respond to proposals in the order they are received, so submitting early gives you the best chance of securing your preferred article and date.

• 11:59 PM EST Sunday November 1st 2026: First draft of article submission committed by author into Perl Advent Calendar Github repository. This need not be 100% completed at this point, but at this stage the Perl Advent Calendar editorial team will start the editing process (correcting typos, editing for house style, making sure the article renders correctly, suggesting language and graphics improvements, etc).

• 11:59 PM EST Sunday November 15th 2026: Deadline for the final changes to the articles.

• 12:00 AM EST Tuesday December 1st 2026: Advent begins. Go live date.

Guidelines on the Articles

• The best way to see what we’re after in an article is to take a look at a previous year’s articles.

• Our articles should try and be light and trivial and along the Christmas theme. Our variable names can be $rudolph, or $frosty, or $mrhankey. Our articles are often stories of problems fictional Christmas characters have. In all, we try to be entertaining in our articles.

• We like our articles to reflect the author’s own unique voice. If you’d like to lean on an LLM to help with things like generating an image, whipping up some sample code, proofreading your article, etc, please do so, but please write the prose yourself. We want to hear your voice. Let your gift be something you put your heart into, rather than your tokens.

• We like our articles to contain text and code interspersed, and if necessary a final script at the end with lots of comments.

• Pictures, graphs, and other graphics are good and highly encouraged. In the last few years we included animated gifs of terminal output, renders of spinning OpenGL snowflakes, SVG Christmas trees, Christmas cats and dogs from Imgur, Spotify playlists, a full interactive JavaScript map of the world showing off GeoIP location from Perl, and even Perl executing in the browser. Go nuts!

• Formatting is in POD with a custom header. See the source for previous years’ articles for examples. You can use =for html or even =for web_only and =for rss_only if needed to add custom HTML to your POD.