Posts

Good software development achieves complexity by describing the interactions between simpler components. Although we tend to think of software processes as step-by-step “wizards”, design and decoupling of components often means that the interactions are non-linear. So why should our software project planning be defined in a linear progression of steps with time estimates? Can we plan projects using a non-linear workflow that mirrors how we think about component design? The figure above is an experiment in task planning that I recently used to try to describe the complex dependencies between different tasks in a project....

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....

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....