I'm still here, honest

I'l get more regular one day :-/

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. But I like to start the year with a few aspirations of things I’ll try to do better in the coming year. This year, one of those was to post to this newsletter more frequently. So I have no idea how it’s fast approaching the end of February and this is the first newsletter of 2025 (and six months - almost to the day - since I last sent a newsletter).

So can I be the last person to wish you a Happy New Year? We’re eight weeks into the year. How’s it going for you so far?

Still munging data - 25 years on

Some of you might be old enough to remember my book Data Munging With Perl. Towards the end of last year, I decided it was about time to produce a second edition. It’s a book I’m proud of and I think it still contains a lot of good advice, but a lot of the actual Perl in the book is looking rather dated now and it will be nice to have a version that updates a lot of the code.

I talked about my plans in a lightning talk at the London Perl Workshop last year. At the time, I mentioned that I hoped the book would be available “by Christmas”. But then I went and took on a full-time client that rather ate into the time I had available to work on the book. So Christmas came and went without the book being published. But I’m still making progress and I hope it’ll be available before too long. I have a bit of a fixed deadline as I’m giving a talk about the book to the Toronto Perl Mongers at the end of March, and I’d like it to be available by then.

The talk will be given over Zoom and it’s free. So please feel free if you’re interested in the book. It’s on 27th March at 20:00 UTC.

• Dave Cross: Still Munging Data with Perl

Proposed Perl Changes

I’ve been part of the Perl community for far longer than I care to admit. But my contributions have mostly been non-technical. So I was surprised when a member of the Perl Steering Council contacted me at the start of the year and asked for my help working on a new website that would make it easier for the community to see upcoming changes that had been proposed for the Perl language.

The PPC process has been in place pretty much since the Perl Steering Council was formed in 2020. But it had been suggested that only having the documents available through the GitHub website means that many people who might otherwise be interested, aren’t reading the proposals. So the PSC had decided it would be useful to turn that repo into a real website. And because of my experience with GitHub Pages and GitHub Actions, I would probably be a good person to get a first draft up and running quickly.

So that’s what I did. You can read more details about how it all works on my Perl Hack blog (part 1, part 2) and you can form your own opinion on how successful I’ve been by looking at the site at https://perl.github.io/PPCs/

Other blog posts

I’ve written a few other blog posts over the last six months that you might find interesting:

• I wrote a simple ad server that allows people to add a banner advert for Perl community events to their website

• I talked about an application I’d written that provides a self-hosted (or, even better, GitHub Pages-hosted) LinkTree-like web page

• We moved the London Perl Mongers website to GitHub Pages (I’m starting to detect a bit of a theme here!)

• I explained a CPAN module I had written that makes it easy to add JSON-LD to a website

AI programming

I’ve been using various AI tools to increase my productivity. But I’m really only dabbling at the moment. Other people are obviously doing more than I am. So this article really interested me. I’m definitely going to try to incorporate some of these suggestions into my workflow.

• My LLM codegen workflow atm

I’ve also been given access to the preview version of GitHub Spark. So I’ll be trying that out over the coming weeks.

And finally…

In the past, I’ve definitely been guilty of buying domain names for projects that I only have the vaguest of plans for. But over the last five years I’ve made a determined effort to stop doing that and to let old domains lapse once it becomes obvious that I’m not going to complete the project they were bought for. I think I’ve let somewhere between a third and a half of my domains lapse.

But sometimes a domain just has to be bought.

And I realised last week that South Sudan were allowing domain registrations at the top level of their ccTLD.

So… davecro.ss.

That’s all for today. Let’s hope it’s not six months until my next newsletter.

Cheers,

Dave…