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

My monthly newsletter is slightly late. One reason is that I wrote a tool to make it easier to see what I've done in a month.

perlhacks.com/2026/04/summ...

An Interesting Note Concerning Interest (or How the Sixth Day of April Came to Have an Altogether… The Diary of Sir Peregrine Blatherwick, MP for Little Wittering (Private. Not for publication, lest my constituents discover what we…

The answer to a question many people in the UK ask every year on this date.

davorg.medium.com/an-interesti...

Dante in Clapham

There's a nightclub in Clapham called Infernos. It's well-known as a venue that no-one enjoys, but everyone ends up at on a night out.

All of which means that "Dante in Clapham" pretty much wrote itself :-)

open.spotify.com/track/6b79cY...

Writing a TOON Module for Perl - Perl Hacks Every so often, a new data serialisation format appears and people get excited about it. Recently, one of those formats is **TOON** — Token-Oriented Object Notation. As the name suggests, it’s another...

How and why I wrote a TOON module for Perl.

perlhacks.com/2026/03/writ...

I've just been sent a "Nigel Farage exposed the Bank of England's secret on Question Time" post - from a fake BBC News website. It's an obvious scam and it's easy to laugh. But how much longer will our finely-tuned bullshit detectors work against ever-improving AI content?

I believe it's now mandatory that on this date every year, Brits all post a social media message like this one...

"Blimey. Six years. What a weird time that was!"

Recovered Doctor Who Special - Riverside Studios Film is Fabulous! presents at Riverside Studios - once a BBC Doctor Who production studio itself - a very special event showcasing cinema screenings of the first three episodes of “The Daleks’ Master ...

For Doctor Who fans (but selling out fast)

riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/Rn-...

London to Brighton

I've held off mentioning my AI music on socials because I know some people have rather negative reactions to the very idea of AI music (for entirely understandable reasons).

But, sod it. I'm really pleased with this one.

open.spotify.com/track/6TVzxS...

Lost Doctor Who and the Daleks episodes discovered in 'ramshackle' collection The Doctor's assistant Peter Purves was invited to a screening of the episodes in Leicester.

It's a good day to be a Doctor Who fan.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Your README Is Already a Website Announcing readme-to-index — My First GitHub Marketplace Release 🎉 Today I published my...

I've published my first Action to the GitHub Marketplace. It's a very simple tool (as all the best ones are!) that takes your repo's README and converts to HTML it for use in a GitHub Pages website. It scratched an itch for me, but it might be useful to other people, too.

dev.to/davorg/your-...

Treating GitHub Copilot as a Contributor - Perl Hacks 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...

I've been using GitHub Copilot as a contributor to my CPAN modules. Here's how I do it

perlhacks.com/2026/02/trea...

Started a GoT rewatch last night. Which, somehow, led to me building this...

davorg.dev/got/got.png

I Built a Tiny Domain Inventory Tool (Because I Used to Buy Too Many Domains) A deliberately simple domain inventory tool built in the browser with plain JavaScript, localStorage, and a healthy distrust of overengineering.

Does anyone else buy more domains than they care to admit? I'm getting much better now... honestly!

But you might find this tool useful.

dev.to/davorg/i-bui...

About - One Thing at a Time Updates from a London-based tech entrepreneur. Click to read One Thing at a Time, by Dave Cross, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

I updated the "About" page on my Substack newsletter to better reflect what it has mutated into.

davecross.substack.com/about

Usually, I trust Spotify to stick with the right vibe when I let it just play stuff. But it just interrupted a nice 70s prog session to play something by Sky (who I had forgotten about).

If it follows that with Tomita, I'm cancelling my subscription.

(Follow me for niche musical opinions :-))

Notes App, Locked (excerpts from a private diary recovered on a cracked iPhone, case stickered with glitter stars and a faded tour laminate)

That thing where you get an idea and can't concentrate on anything else until you publish it.

davorg.medium.com/notes-app-lo...

Most of what I know about US political procedures comes from The West Wing, Bloom County (Meadow Party, 1984) or Howard the Duck (All-Night Party, 1976).

I watched Trump's speech at Davos. How bad does it need to get before someone invokes the 25th Amendment?

Today I had lunch in the same restaurant as Dexter Sol Ansell - who is one of the leads in "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" (the new "Game of Thrones" prequel).

Weird to think that was probably his last public meal before the show is broadcast on Monday and half of the population will recognise him

The World: Hey Grok, those sexual images aren't a good idea
Grok: Oh, ok. I'll limit that feature to paying customers
The World: You're really not seeing the problem here
Grok: Ok. I've turned that feature off completely...
The World: Good
Grok: ...in jurisdictions where it's illegal
The World: FFS

These blog posts (by James Duncan, an old friend from the early dotbom boom) are very good marketing for his new project. Good because they're clear and make great points, but don't (yet) give away anything about what it is. And leave you (well, me, at least) desperate to know more.

page.love/blog/

Learn with Dave Cross Technical training courses from Dave Cross

I've decided to bring altogether all my old Perl training decks from the last 25 years. They might be useful to someone. And they might encourage more people to hire me to run courses for them :-)

I made a (small) start on that today. It'll take a while!

learn.davecross.co.uk/slides/

People have been talking about Perl's rather impressive improvement in the TIOBE index over recent months. I dug into the data.

tiobe.perlhacks.com

I've just been (mildly) bitten by a Markdown gotcha. Who can work out what problem this commit fixed?

github.com/davorg/davec...

I'm rather enjoying this conversation with a scammer (even though I know it's, ultimately, pointless) 🙂

Retirement isn’t a date, it’s a dial How to make work optional long before you reach pension age.

I really don't want to come across as a lifestyle guru or some kind of finance bro, but I wrote down some things I was thinking about over the weekend.

davorg.medium.com/retirement-i...

Books and websites and clouds, oh my! And totally failing to stick to "one thing at a time"

Here's the newsletter I sent out to subscribers on New Year's Eve.

davecross.substack.com/p/books-and-...

App::HTTPThis: the tiny web server I keep reaching for - Perl Hacks Whenever I’m building a static website, I almost never start by reaching for Apache, nginx, Docker, or anything that feels like “proper infrastructure”. Nine times out of ten I just want a directory s...

A command-line program I use constantly. Maybe you'll find it useful too.

perlhacks.com/2026/01/apph...

Extract 2: Horsell Common - Hatch Open A Checklist Completed Under Damp Conditions

This week's entry in "The Horsell Transmissions" was published this morning.

horsell.substack.com/p/extract-2-...

Maybe it's not the right day to mention this. But if you're planning some kind of "giving up a particular pleasure for January" exercise starting tomorrow, then Dave's Dry January tracker will tell you how far through it you are.

davorg.dev/january/

A Note on the Provenance of the Documents I have learned, over the years, that there are two reliable ways to acquire a thing you do not fully understand.

I've written a little more about my new Substack project - The Horsell Transmissions

open.substack.com/pub/horsell/...