What's the Shrt Stry on Go Var Names

Is I have mentioned in a previous post we are all products of our own histories, and this will definitely impact your appreciation or frustration of the subtleties of the Go community guidelines on naming. …

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Bazel Fawlty

Like Basil Fawlty, Bazel promises a great deal, but makes a bit of a fuss about something that could have been done so much more easily. This is at least true in any medium to large sized Golang project, it is worse if using OSX. Whilst Bazels goals are desireable they are easily and more simply achieved with the Go tools, especially since go 1.10. …

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The Road Not Taken

On our honeymoon In the mountains around Kitzbuhel in the summer many years ago, me and my wife were following a Wanderweg when we turned onto a small path that the map showed to be a nice route back to our hotel Schloss Lebenberg. …

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Shut Up and Take My Money Summary

Vincent Haupert Presented at the Chaos Communication Congress A talk about some severe security breaches in the fintech startup Number26 app and API. Here is a summary of the key points. …

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The Cult of Go Test

A favourite test helper library, with some simple test assertion functions clearly has some value. But this post puts forward some useable concrete arguments why they are normally just not worth it. …

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What Golang Is and Is Not

We are all products of our own histories, and I suspect many routes to Go have been made less enjoyable by misguided expectations. The journey from when a budding developer first ‘hello worlded’ to now may have made Go’s more subtle strengths less obvious to them. …

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The Test Pyramid and Availability Bias

The test pyramid has its place - it gets across a simple idea, but it has been taken too literally, and applied innapropriately. …

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Queues Are Not Always The Answer

I feel developers reach for the queue all too quickly. I’m talking about stand alone message queue services like RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ etc. etc. Not an in memory data structure (which in fact can be all you need sometimes) …

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JSON, Gzip, Snappy and Gob Across the Wire

Coming from a background where memory and clock cycles were sparse, binary encodings have always held an appeal. Since then I’ve been told we have loads of compute power, ample cheap RAM and disk, and when the network is the bottleneck then, well, that is a good problem to have. Its one of those ages old occasionally heated debates…. (tl;dr almost always use gzipped JSON) …

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Jmeter is a Poor Choice for REST and Golang

Its essential we have good integration tests and performance tests on our restful api, particularly now that many of the moving parts will migrate to microservices written in Go. Trying to use Jmeter both to validate responses and apply reasonable load has been troublesome. …

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