Looking at Questhub this evening, I saw BOOK's quest, where he included an ascii graph of his releases per year. I asked him on IRC how he created the graph, but I didn't get a reply in time, so wrote a script to do it. What does your graph look like?
I realised I could use CPAN::ReleaseHistory, which I recently released. A quick hack later, here's my release history:
1996 ( 5) ###
1997 ( 12) #########
1998 ( 8) ######
1999 ( 1)
2000 ( 3) ##
2001 ( 18) ##############
2002 ( 17) #############
2003 ( 2) #
2004 ( 2) #
2005 ( 1)
2006 ( 0)
2007 ( 0)
2008 ( 0)
2009 ( 0)
2010 ( 0)
2011 ( 8) ######
2012 ( 61) ################################################
2013 ( 61) ################################################
2014 ( 63) ##################################################
As you can see, I was born again in (late) 2011. I was surprised to discover that my most productive year is already this year, and it's only February! That's largely down to this quest (to get all my dists 'CPANTS clean'), and adopting a few dists.
I've now tidied this up into the cpan-release-counts script, which is bundled with CPAN::ReleaseHistory. It takes an optional --user, and you can also change the character used to draw the bars, and specify the max bar width. Here's the history of all CPAN releases:
% cpan-release-counts --char = --width 30
1995 ( 193)
1996 ( 634)
1997 ( 1403) =
1998 ( 2253) ==
1999 ( 2705) ===
2000 ( 3475) ====
2001 ( 5649) ======
2002 ( 7511) ========
2003 (10129) ===========
2004 (11331) =============
2005 (12410) ==============
2006 (12773) ==============
2007 (14536) ================
2008 (18534) =====================
2009 (21078) ========================
2010 (22225) =========================
2011 (21893) =========================
2012 (22669) ==========================
2013 (25768) ==============================
2014 ( 3502) ====
And how does January this year compare to all previous Januaries?
% cpan-release-counts -m -w 40 -c \* | grep '^ ....01'
199601 ( 32)
199701 ( 117) *
199801 ( 193) ***
199901 ( 174) **
200001 ( 236) ***
200101 ( 361) *****
200201 ( 603) *********
200301 ( 769) ************
200401 (1058) *****************
200501 (1096) ******************
200601 (1168) *******************
200701 ( 982) ****************
200801 (1564) *************************
200901 (1673) ***************************
201001 (1881) ******************************
201101 (2025) *********************************
201201 (1708) ****************************
201301 (2020) *********************************
201401 (2218) ************************************