Rakudo hacker moritz is auditioning for the role of the Good Idea Fairy, which I personally think he’s a shoe-in for. A few days ago in the IRC chatroom he had this gem:

moritz>      hey, have you ever thought of starting a parrot advent calendar?
whiteknight> moritz: sort of, but I wouldn't want to steal your thunder
moritz>      whiteknight: I wouldn't worry about that. There's usually half a
             dozen advent calendars in the Perl community, and we don't seem
             to suffer from that
...
moritz>      whiteknight: don't feel obliged, 'twas just a quick idea. Maybe
             next year if it's too much work this year
whiteknight> moritz: If there is one thing I like doing, it's stealing good
             ideas from the Rakudo folks

So that’s what I’m going to try to do: Do a daily advent-ish sort of calendar for Parrot as similar to the one that moritz does himself as I can manage. Instead of a normal advent calendar which would be the first 25 days of December, I’m going to do the remaining days leading up to New Years. Since I’m already running irrepairably late, I won’t be able to do 25 daily posts between now and then. All the better, really, since I am having trouble coming up with that many ideas! Give me a break, I’m new to this whole advent thing.

What I say I would like to do, and what I am actually able to get done in the coming days are two entirely different things. Add the usual holiday stressors and time-sinks with the cleanups and organizational hassles of moving to a new house (That’s right, we got the house!) and suddenly doing a blog post every day seems like a pretty daunting order. Again, I will do my best

Every day from now till the end of the year, starting tomorrow, I’m going to try to post at least a short blurb about something cool in the world of Parrot. I’ll try to focus on things that we’ve done cool in 2011 or are planning to do come 2012, but if I can find some things worth writing about that are older and are standing the test of time particularly well, I’ll write about that too.

If this goes well and I don’t get all lazy and skip too many days, maybe we can turn this into some sort of regular tradition. If other Parrot hackers want to jump in and write a short guest post here on this blog, or write their own posts elsewhere, let me know. More help is more awesome!

Obviously I’m going to mention some of the projects I’ve been working on because those are the things I know the most about. I’ll try to include a bunch of cool projects from other people too. Please send me ideas if there is something you want to read about in the coming month.

Tomorrow the advent calendar officially starts. I’m going to begin by talking about the main course: the bird.