Git (cont.)
In this post I’m going to be talking about how I use git. That is, what conventions I use, and what style I apply. First, Git is a Distributed Version Control System. A project is… »
Distributed Version Control (Git)
I’ve been wanting to post about Git for a very long time - it’s a very important tool in any software developer’s toolkit. For the uninitiated Git is a tool that people can use to… »
Event Driven Architecture (AWS)
Amazon’s cloud service (AWS) allows for an event based architecture, that is, a series of products can be linked to one another via events, with the events emitted by one product being processed by another… »
Passing data across software boundaries
When developing software natural, the concept of boundaries arises. A package, library, service, or system needs to communicate information to other packages, libraries, services, systems, and users. The boundary lies between those two entities. The… »
Formal Computer Science Education
In professional software engineering there’s a common debate on the merits of a University degree in Computer Science. The points of view tend to be that such a degree (or its equivalent) is either an… »
Buffered Channels
Go provides channels as a way to communicate between two goroutines. In essence a channel is a synchronised queue, where a producer writes to the channel, implicitly using the mutex that is hidden inside it… »
Software Optimisation
Time, and resources, cost money. There’s no way around it, people don’t want to use slow services, nobody wants to wait any more than they feel that they have to. Nobody wants to pay more… »
Mechanical Keyboards
As a software engineer the keyboard is one of the tools I will physically interact with for a large part of my day. Many other professions are also finding themselves interacting with keyboards too. It’s… »
Terminal Gifs
If you’re wanting to share examples of working in a terminal, such as what I will be pasting below, then you will be needing a way to record, and share what happens. There is a… »
Go development with Vim
For Go development there are a plethora of editors available that someone can use for their daily editor, Go has a wiki page that lists editors and plugins that support Go development. It wasn’t too… »
Testing, in production
Testing software, somewhat surprisingly, is a contentious subject. Not whether testing should be done or not, but the right way to go about it. We test to give ourselves confidence, confidence that the software does… »
// nolint: linter
The weekly edition of Programmer Weekly duly arrived in my email inbox last night. This edition contained a blog article arguing that linter comments that disable linting for parts of a given codebase should be… »
Computing resources - the big O notation
As a software developer, no matter what you create, or where you are in the chain of an application, front end, back end, mobile, it doesn’t matter, there are limited resources to be managed. Those… »
Signalling Ownership
When creating complex software, a very important question is going to be asked about shared resources. Who owns that resource. Monolithic, multi threaded, multi process systems all need to deal with this issue, in one… »
Benchmarking in Go
Unit testing code is validity testing. The developer is ensuring that the function being tested deals with the supplied input in an expected way, either producing output, or returning error information, that is considered appropriate.… »
Kubernetes confusions
Probably the most confusing part for new Kubernetes users is the fact that it has little to no idea about their favourite containerisation technology. That is, Kubernetes cares not how to build a Docker container,… »
GNU/Linux on the Desktop
I’ve used GNU/Linux for my primary operating system (on desktops) for roughly 14 years. I used Microsoft Windows products for about 10 years before that, and occasionally since (usually mandated by employment), but not at… »
Defer - part II
Recently I wrote a post on using defers, this is a deeper dive into the defer mechanism. As previously explained the idea of defer is to give developers a way to ensure that code is… »
Testing with Mocks, Fakes, and Monkeypatching in Go
There are times that code that needs to be unit tested contains code that interacts with things you do not want to run during a unit test. Interactions with expensive web services, hardware, production datastores,… »
Setting Environment Variables - in a VPS
I’ve written a very simple twitter bot (you can find the source at github.com/shaneHowearth/proverbs), that takes some content from a local database, logs into twitter and posts that content. Running this bot on a VPS… »