A Slice of Perl

Sliced camel

Earlier this week, I read a post from someone who failed a job interview because they used a hash slice in some sample code and the interviewer didn’t believe it would work. That’s not just wrong — it’s a teachable moment. Perl has several kinds of slices, and they’re all powerful tools for writing expressive, […]

Generating Content with ChatGPT

ReadABooker website

Back in January, I wrote a blog post about adding JSON-LD to your web pages to make it easier for Google to understand what they were about. The example I used was my ReadABooker site, which encourages people to read more Booker Prize shortlisted novels (and to do so by buying them using my Amazon […]

Turning AI into a Developer Superpower: The PERL5LIB Auto-Setter

AI Programming as a Super Power

Like most developers, I have a mental folder labelled “useful little tools I’ll probably never build.” Small utilities, quality-of-life scripts, automations — they’d save time, but not enough to justify the overhead of building them. So they stay stuck in limbo. That changed when I started using AI as a regular part of my development […]

A link site of your very own

Dave's pointless links site

When I first wrote about my pointless personal side projects a few months ago, I used the software I had written to generate my own link site (like a LinkTree clone) as an example. I’m happy to report that I’ve continued to work on this software. Recently, it passed another milestone—I released a version to CPAN. It’s called App::LinkSite[*]. If […]

Dancing with Copilot Workspace

Example Dancer app

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 […]