January 4, 2020

Storing Configuration in the environment

There are two different ways to store configurations in the environment. One can choose to store a file name in an environment variable, or one can choose to use one environment variable per configuration. Take https://github.com/spf13/viper for example, the BindEnv() and related functions are designed to work with the one env var per configuration approach. The downside is that setting environment variables in the OS is tedious and requires flat/unstructured configurations.

November 29, 2019

Go1 13 Errors

For me, Go 1.13 arrived with anticipation of better error handling. Presently, the second Google search result for Go 1.13 error hanlding is an article that refers to the “xerrors” package. One feature of the xerrors package is that it produced errors with a stack trace showing where the error came from. The addition to Go 1.13, however, did not include this particular feature, and left me spending frustrating hours trying to debug the loss of stack trace after switching from xerrors to the standard library.

September 3, 2019

Why We Code Review

Code review can be an important part of a team’s culture, so it is worth thinking about. If you asked me about code review two years ago, I would’ve said its key to maintaining code quality and mentoring less experienced programmers. Now I know better. Code review is much about making the code better as it is about making the team happier. How the team runs code reviews should be based on the team’s values and culture.

August 30, 2019

Configuring iTerm For a Better Keyboard Experience

The default terminal on OS X isn’t really that great. It doesn’t let me reconfigure keybindings to my liking. There are two other terminal choices for OS X: Hyper and iTerm 2. When it comes to being customizable, I think Hyper wins. However, there are some really annoying things about it: It is an Electron app, which means it is a memory hog. You cannot drag and manipulate tabs the way you can with native apps.

August 22, 2019

Interview Questions

Good technical interview questions are hard to find. In the last month, I’ve seen some really great ones and equally bad ones. I want to go through some of them and write down my highly biased 5-star rating on their effectiveness. First, for some context on how I evaluate interview questions. Your interview questions should be: Respectful of the candidates Objective and evaluated consistently Gathers relevant and insightful data

August 19, 2019

Deploying Go

I’ve written a lot of Python. If I need to create something quickly, I tend to go to Python. I’ve written a lot of Java. But I almost never write Java code outside of work. One thing I liked about Java over Python, however, was ease of deployment. I can package all third party dependencies into a single executable jar, making it easy to upload and distribute artifacts. I have never mastered packaging Python for distribution.

August 19, 2019

Own Your Data

I previously wrote about owning my own data. An important part of data ownership is backing up your data. I use S3 as my long term data store. It is pretty easy to set this up using Terraform.

S3

Provisioning a S3 bucket is simply a single Terraform resource:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "repo_archive_log" {
  acl = "log-delivery-write"
  bucket = "example-bucket"
  tags = {
    Name = "example"
    TTL = "persistent"
    ManagedBy = "Terraform"
  }
}

August 13, 2019

Stupid Emacs trick for writing Go code

Lately, I have been writing more code outside of full-fleged IDEs and found myself tweaking Emacs into a lightweight IDE for Go. Having gofmt automagically formatting the code and refreshing it in the buffer is simply lovely. My current go-mode cusomization looks like this:

First, get the excellent go-playground package.

(package-install 'go-playround)

Then, configure Emacs

;; Automatically format your code on save
(add-hook 'before-save-hook 'gofmt-before-save)

;; Automatically display gofmt processed code in buffers
(custom-set-variables
 '(global-auto-revert-mode t)
 '(auto-revert-interval 1))

;; Verbose output when running tests via go-test-current-*
(setq go-test-args "-v")

August 11, 2019

Another year, another blog

A little more than a year ago, I moved my blog from Blogger to Medium. Medium, as a blogging platform, was always meant to be temporary. It is platform with a modern look. It is a free service. One does not need to worry about domain registration, uptime, security patches(!), or a host of little things that adds up. The price is, however, to give up control of your content.