Day 25 – Raku 2025 Review

How time flies. Yet another year has flown by. Let’s first start with the technical stuff, as nerds do! Rakudo Rakudo saw about 1650 commits (MoarVM, NQP, Rakudo, doc) this year, which is about 20% less than 2024. All of these repositories now have “main” as their default branch (rather than “master”). About 58% ofContinue reading “Day 25 – Raku 2025 Review”

Day 23 – A Day Late and A Fish Short

Hello again! I return during this week of winter solstice to tell you about my experience participating in the Langjam Gamejam. I planned to use Raku, partially so that you could have an advent blogpost to read today, but also because Raku’s builtin support for grammars ensure that I would not get stuck when writingContinue reading “Day 23 – A Day Late and A Fish Short”

Day 22 – Numerically 2026 Is Unremarkable Yet Happy

This document explores the properties and relationships of the integer 2026. It is classified as a semiprime and a happy number, with 365 serving as one of its primitive roots. While 2026 may not stand out significantly in number theory, it offers a great opportunity to create elaborate visualizations that highlight some interesting aspects of the number.

Day 21 – A Terminal’s Tale

Today’s story is about my naiveness and terminals. The original task is simple. Show the output of some program in a sub frame of a TUI application. (TUI == Text User Interface, i.e. apps like tmux, vim, k9s)For those that wonder, there is a yet to be finished TUI debugger application I’m working on, theContinue reading “Day 21 – A Terminal’s Tale”

Day 19 – Welcome to the Megadungeon

Welcome, weary traveler. It is known that you come bearing earnest questions and we congratulate you on managing to arrive here, on this precipice of doom. Not a brutal doom, nor even a fearful doom, but a doom as in a fate open to you. See, your arrival here stands foretold. In fact, we builtContinue reading “Day 19 – Welcome to the Megadungeon”

Day 18 – Hallo, Wêreld!

The first elf language is the sharing of emotions. Next comes their mother tongue. When elves start speaking their first programming language, then they are already onto their third language! Santa imagines raku draws inspiration from many principles of Unix philosophy In particular, localization of raku plays into the robustness principle. When writing to Santa,Continue reading “Day 18 – Hallo, Wêreld!”

Day 17 – An issue with evaluation

Lizzybel was walking the corridors of North Pole Central when Steve, the Physics Elf, came up to her. “Have you seen my issue on this very nice module of yours?”, he asked. “Oof, I guess I must have missed that, sorry!”, said Lizzybel, while thinking to herself “I really should look more at my modulesContinue reading “Day 17 – An issue with evaluation”

Day 16 – Melian and the Helpers of Evergreen

by Sawyer X Operation Evergreen began quietly that winter. Santa had announced it as a workshop-wide initiative to improve the speed and efficiency of analytics across every team (logs, metrics, scheduling, routing, and storage). The elves who maintained the Workshop’s growing systems found themselves gathered around long benches, examining slow queries, performance charts, and theContinue reading “Day 16 – Melian and the Helpers of Evergreen”

Day 14 – Taming Concurrency

Hello everyone and a merry advent time! Today I’d like to show case a neat little mechanism that allows building concurrent applications without having to worry about the concurrency much. I’ve built this tool as part of the (yet to be released) Rakudo CI Bot. That’s a middle man that watches GitHub for things toContinue reading “Day 14 – Taming Concurrency”