Over the last few months, I’ve been dabbling in using AI to generate or improve code. I have a subscription to GitHub Copilot and I’m finding it a really useful tool for increasing my productivity. Copilot comes in several different flavours, and I’ve been making particular use of a couple of them. Copilot Autocomplete was […] The post Dancing with Copilot Workspace appeared first on Perl Hacks ..read more

We need programmers who like to play on the bleading edge. By trying out new features, they are able to report on problems that they find – and, in doing so, improve the experience for the many people who follow them. I’m not usually much of a bleading edge programmer. But I’ve been enjoying Perl’s […] The post On the [b]leading edge first appeared on Perl Hacks ..read more

Back in May, I wrote a blog post about how I had moved a number of Dancer2 applications to a new server and had, in the process, created a standardised procedure for deploying Dancer2 apps. It’s been about six weeks since I did that and I thought it would be useful to give a little […] The post Deploying Dancer Apps (Addendum) first appeared on Perl Hacks ..read more

Data Munging with Perl was published in February 2001. That was over 23 years ago. It’s even 10 years since Manning took the book out of print and the rights to the content reverted to me. Over that time, I’ve been to a lot of Perl conferences and met a lot of people who have bought and read the book. Many of them have been kind enough to say nice things about how useful they have found it. And many of those readers have followed up by asking if there would ever be a second edition. My answer has always been the same. It’s a lot of effort to publish a book. The Perl book market (over the last ..read more

I gave my first public talk sometime between the 22nd and 24th September 2000. It was at the first YAPC::Europe which was held in London between those dates. I can’t be any more precise because the schedule is no longer online and memory fades. I can, however, tell you that the talk was a disaster. I originally wasn’t planning to give a talk at all, but my first book was about to be published and the publishers thought that giving a talk about it to a room full of Perl programmers would be great marketing. I guess that makes sense. But what they didn’t take into account was the fact that I kne ..read more

I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time thinking about Amazon links over the last three or four years. It started with the Perl School web site. Obviously, I knew that the book page needed a link to Amazon – so people could buy the books if they wanted to – but that’s complicated by the fact that Amazon has so many different sites and I have no way of knowing which site is local to anyone who visits my web site. I had the same problem when I built a web site for George and the Smart Home. And again when I created a site for Will Sowman’s books. At some point soon, I’ll also want to pu ..read more

I can’t be the only programmer who does this. You’re looking for an online service to fill some need in your life. You look at three or four competing products and they all get close but none of them do everything you want. Or maybe they do tick all the boxes but they cost that little bit more than you’re comfortable paying. After spending a few hours on your search that little voice pops up in your head with that phrase that you really don’t want to hear: Maybe you should just write your own version. How hard can it be? A couple of hours later, you have something that vaguely works, you’ve ..read more

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed – William Gibson The quotation above was used by Tim O’Reilly a lot around the time that Web 2.0 got going. Over recent months, I’ve had a few experiences that have made it clear to me that even the present isn’t particularly evenly distributed either. It’s always easy to find people still using technologies that we would consider archaic (and not in a rustic or hipster way). We’ve known for twenty years that CGI is a bad idea. It’s almost ten years since CGI.pm was removed from Perl core. Surely, all of us are using somethin ..read more

You might remember that I’ve been taking an interest in GitHub Actions for the last year or so (I even wrote a book on the subject). And at the Perl Conference in Toronto last summer I gave a talk called “GitHub Actions for Perl Development” (here are the slides and the video). During that talk, I mentioned a project I was working on to produce a set of reusable workflows that would make it easier for anyone to start using GitHub Actions in their Perl development. Although (as I said in the talk) things were moving pretty quickly on the project at the time, once I got back to London, several o ..read more

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Olaf Alders’ talk, Whither Perl, at the Perl and Raku Conference in Toronto last month. I think it’s well worth spending forty minutes watching it. It triggered a few ideas that I’ll be writing about over the coming weeks and, today, I wanted to start by talking briefly about the idea of GitHub Organisations and introducing a couple of organisations that I’ve recently set up. Olaf talks about GitHub Organisations as a way to ensure the continuity of your projects. And I think that’s a very important point. I’ve written a few times over recent years abou ..read more