Strict typing in the Go programming language provides safety and performance that is valuable even if it does increase the verbosity of code. If there is a drawback to be found with strict typing, it is usually felt by library developers who require flexibility to cover different use cases, and most often appears as a suite of type-named functions such as lib.HandleString, lib.HandleUint64, lib.HandleBool and so on. Go does provide two important language tools that do provide a lot of flexibility in library development: closures and interfaces, which we will explore in this post. ...

A facelift for Libelli today! I moved from Jekyll to Hugo for static site generation, a move that has been long overdue — and I’m very happy I’ve done it. Not only can I take advantage of a new theme with extra functionality (PaperMod in this case) but also because Hugo is written in Go, I feel like I have more control over how the site gets generated. A lot has been said on this topic, if you’re thinking about migrating from Jekyll to Hugo, I recommend Sara Soueidan’s blog post — the notes here are Libelli specific and are listed here more as notes than anything else. ...

gRPC makes the specification and implementation of networked APIs a snap. But what is the simplest way to document a gRPC API? There seem to be some hosted providers by Google, e.g. SmartDocs, but I have yet to find a gRPC-specific tool. For REST API frameworks, documentation is commonly generated along with live examples using OpenAPI (formerly swagger). By using grpc-gateway it appears to be pretty straight forward to generate a REST/gRPC API combo from protocol buffers and then hook into the OpenAPI specification. ...

I went on a brief adventure looking into creating a lightweight certificate authority (CA) in Go to issue certificates for mTLS connections between peers in a network. The CA was a simple command line program and the idea was that the certificate would initialize its own self-generated certs whose public key would be included in the code base of the peer-to-peer servers, then it could generate TLS x.509 key pairs signed by the CA. Of course you could do this with openssl, but I wanted to keep a self-coded Go version around for posterity. ...

Developer computers often get a lot of cruft built up in non-standard places because of compiled binaries, assets, packages, and other tools that we install over time then forget about as we move onto other projects. In general, I like to reinstall my OS and wipe my disk every year or so to prevent crud from accumulating. As an interemediate step, this post compiles several maintenance caommands that I run fairly routinely. ...

This post is a response to Go: Multiple Errors Management. I’ve dealt with a multiple error contexts in a few places in my Go code but never created a subpackage for it in github.com/bbengfort/x and so I thought this post was a good motivation to explore it in slightly more detail. I’d also like to make error contexts for routine cancellation a part of my standard programming practice, so this post also investigates multiple error handling in a single routine or multiple routines like the original post. ...

For scientific reproducibility, it has become common for me to output experimental results as zip files that contain both configurations and inputs as well as one or more output results files. This is similar to .epub or .docx formats which are just specialized zip files - and allows me to easily rerun experiments for comparison purposes. Recently I tried to dump some json data into a zip file using Python 3.8 and was surprised when the code errored as it seemed pretty standard. This is the story of the crazy loophole that I had to go into as a result. ...