Category Archives: 2019

Day 21: Searching for a Red gift

Alabaster Snowball, the elf, was searching for a gift for the person he had drawn on the North Pole’s Secret Santa. He had the great honour to draw Santa! What to give for the one who gives everyone’s presents? So he was searching on the internet for some keywords he knew Santa would like: automaticContinue reading “Day 21: Searching for a Red gift”

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”

Day 14 – Thinking Beyond Types: an Introduction to Rakudo’s MOP

It’s Christmas season! Christmas would not be Christmas without the caroling that’s part of the festivities, so let’s make it possible to sing some. We could simply make a carol one giant string, but that’s not good enough. Being a song, carols often have a chorus that’s repeated in between verses. If we were toContinue reading “Day 14 – Thinking Beyond Types: an Introduction to Rakudo’s MOP”

Day 13 – A Little R&R

A Little R&R Introduction Raku is a really nice language. Versatile, expressive, fast, dwimmy. The only problem I sometimes have with it is that it can be a little slow. Fortunately that can easily be solved by the NativeCall interface, which makes it easy to call C code in your Raku program. Now, as niceContinue reading “Day 13 – A Little R&R”

Day 12 – Making a simple bot in Raku

Making IRC bots is incredibly simple in Raku, thanks to IRC::Client. It allows you to create a very simple bot in about 20 lines of code. There’s a plugin system that allows easy re-use of code between multiple bots, and adding customized features can be as easy as dropping in an anonymous class. So, let’sContinue reading “Day 12 – Making a simple bot in Raku”

Day 10 – A Teaser

Santa has a special treat: a teaser if you will. A part of a chapter from the upcoming book “Migrating Perl to Raku”, to be published January 2020. Optimization Considerations If you are an experienced Perl programmer, you have (perhaps inadvertently) learned a few tricks to make execution of your Perl program faster. Some ofContinue reading “Day 10 – A Teaser”

Day 9: a chain (or Russian doll) of containers

If you’re in the business, you’ve probably by now heard about containers. They can be described as executables on steroids, or also, as its namesake, a great way of shipping applications anywhere, or have then stored and ready to use whenever you need them. These kinda-executables are called images, and you can find them inContinue reading “Day 9: a chain (or Russian doll) of containers”

Day 8 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku (Part 2)

Yesterday, we made a short Grammar that could parse a single line of the user.js that Firefox uses. Today, we’ll be adding a number of test cases to make sure everything we want to match will match properly. Additionally, the Grammar can be expanded to match multiple lines, so we can let the Grammar parseContinue reading “Day 8 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku (Part 2)”

Day 7 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku

One of the simplest way to properly configure Firefox, and make the configurations syncable between devices without the need of 3rd party services, is through the user.js file in your Firefox profile. This is a simple JavaScript file that generally contains a list of user_pref function calls. Today, I’ll be showing you how to useContinue reading “Day 7 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku”