Summarising a Month of Git Activity with Perl (and a Little Help from AI)

Summarising Git commits

Every month, I write a newsletter which (among other things) discusses some of the technical projects I’ve been working on. It’s a useful exercise — partly as a record for other people, but mostly as a way for me to remember what I’ve actually done. Because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s very easy to […]

Treating GitHub Copilot as a Contributor

Issues that Copilot has worked on

For some time, we’ve talked about GitHub Copilot as if it were a clever autocomplete engine. It isn’t. Or rather, that’s not all it is. The interesting thing — the thing that genuinely changes how you work — is that you can assign GitHub issues to Copilot. And it behaves like a contributor. Over the […]

The Perl and Raku Conference, Toronto 2023

It’s been over twenty years since I spoke at a conference in North America. That was at OSCON in San Diego. I’ve actually never spoken at a YAPC, TPC or TPRC in North America. I have the standard European concern about being seen to encourage the USA’s bad behaviour by actually visiting it, so when […]

Not that PR, thanks

GitHub Workflow to reject PRs

It’s October. And that means that Hacktoberfest has started. If you can get four pull requests accepted on other people’s code repositories during October then you can win a t-shirt. In many ways, I think it’s a great idea. It encourages people to get involved in open source software. But in other ways, it can […]

RT – Action Plan for CPAN Authors

CPAN RT

CPAN RT is going away. CPAN authors have until the beginning of March to extract any useful information from it. RT is the “Request Tracker”, a bug tracking system that is written by Best Practical. For almost as long as I can remember, anyone who uploads a module to CPAN gets a free ticket queue […]