nigehamilton

Day 1 – Dancer, Dasher and Dosh (LLM-powered shell commands)

Dancer, Dasher and the other reindeer work overtime on Christmas Eve delivering billions of gifts. Each year the DevOps elves try and make things flow a bit smoother. The team use dosh (Do-Shell) – a Raku-powered command-line utility for turning natural language into platform-friendly shell commands. Instead of remembering all those pesky command-line utilities andContinue reading “Day 1 – Dancer, Dasher and Dosh (LLM-powered shell commands)”

Day 2 – WAT LLM coding tool do you want for Christmas?

Programming for a living used to be an active conversation between yourself, the computer, and your colleagues. This Christmas, a new guest is joining the programming party: the LLM. Large Language Models (LLMs) can talk a lot and, just like your eccentric uncle at Christmas, occasionally blurt out something bonkers. But do we want toContinue reading “Day 2 – WAT LLM coding tool do you want for Christmas?”

Day 2: Less Variable Wattage = More Flow

Finding flow while coding is sometimes tricky to do – it’s even trickier when encountering ‘someone else’s code’. We’ve all had the experience of reading code and crying, “WAT?!”. Working with high ‘wattage’ code is not just unpleasant, it costs time and money. The more WATs a program contains, the scarier it is, and sadly,Continue reading “Day 2: Less Variable Wattage = More Flow”

Day 2: Perl is dead. Long live Perl and Raku.

‘Perl is dead’, is a meme that’s just plain wrong. Perl isn’t dead. It’s just dead to some programmers. Complicated regexes? Sigils? There’s more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI)? Sometimes when programmers encounter Perl in the wild they react with fear. “WTF!?”, they cry! But fear needn’t be a Perl killer. If youContinue reading “Day 2: Perl is dead. Long live Perl and Raku.”

Day 16: Raku powered jmp-ing to the coalface

Santa makes sure his elves can get to and from the workplace quickly. I wish it was the same for computer programming! Sometimes it takes a while to wade through a codebase to find where the real work needs to happen. jmp is a Raku powered command-line utility I use for searching and jumping aroundContinue reading “Day 16: Raku powered jmp-ing to the coalface”