Homemade CLI Tools

2021-12-13

Go is great! We all know that. I spend most of my coding time on the back-end of the services we build. For many years, before I moved to Go, I used to create my tools as a combinations of various scripting languages - not excluding PHP! Most of it was run by Bash that was executed as a cron job, systemd service or manually as a one-shot executable. I must say, Bash is not as bad as many seem to think.…

Embedding Types to Reuse Code with Less Noise

2020-04-30

My previous post was about one of the concurrency patterns that can be achieved with go. I immediately got some feedback on it, and this is where I will address one of them. You have seen the code reimplementing sync.WaitGroup to have a semaphore in it. type WaitGroup interface { Add(delta int) Done() Wait() } type SemaphoredWaitGroup struct { sem chan bool wg sync.WaitGroup } func (s *SemaphoredWaitGroup) Add(delta int) { s.…

Semaphored Wait Group

2020-04-29

One of the first things you might like to try when starting your journey with Go are the concurrency patterns. You will probably start using goroutines to run things “in the background”, and you will also get to know channels that allow for safe communication between the sub-processes. When you’ll want to spawn many goroutines, you will surely get to know WaitGroups to wait for them to finish. There will also be the defer statement which helps you to not forget to clean up after a function has finished running (and remember, deferred calls are executed in reverse order).…

Money Is Not Everything

2020-04-27

The money question Quite often I found myself in an interview baffled by a question about my financial terms. Some interviewers require a range, some a single number. It is easier if the job ad has the offered range specified from the beginning, but only a little. Having been a professional software developer for almost 15 years (i.e. since I started my self-employment in 2006) I am not shy to ask for the top offered value.…

Automated testing in a build pipeline

2020-04-14

A testing mindset with its' scripts would be incomplete if we did not put them to good use. Ideally, tests should be run every time we intend to share our code with anyone - be it our team or the whole world. It is a tech lead’s wet dream to work in an environment where every dev thoroughly tests their solutions. As this might be impossible, we can have the next best thing.…

Multiple tests run in bulk using Bash

2020-03-19

Having briefly explained what a test is we can come to an inevitable conclusion that having only a single test is never enough. We usually write a lot of them and it is useful to group them. Assuming that the tests we are using conform to the contract of returning proper exit statuses, the whole group can technically be treated like a single test. Let’s put them inside a tests.sh script:…

What is a test in software development?

2020-03-17

When joining a new project (and maybe even in a previously unknown programming language) we can get overwhelmed by the complexity of the test suites. Sometimes it can even be a nightmare to run them, not to mention understand what is going on. There are lots of levels the tests can be run on. Let’s start with the basics. Anything that checks if a requirement is met is a test. How do we apply this mindset in real life?…

LOL is not the same for everyone

2020-02-10

I, living in Poland, am very used to writing the laughter sound as “hahaha”. (It should be with spaces - at least in Polish - but… “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” and apparently “cha cha cha” is also correct.) Imagine my surprise, when we made some new Arabic speaking friends in Dubai (Hi Jihed!). They use “hhhh” which is another kind of funny for us. I asked around and it turns out that in Spanish speaking folks use “ja ja ja” (Thanks Domi).…

Tea. Earl Grey. Decaf.

2020-02-10

I am a nerd and a full-on geek when it comes to Star Trek: TNG . This show (!) shaped me. Gene Roddenberry’s ideas that made it into a philosophical discussion about the future of humanity have been engraved onto my core system. And now we have Star Trek: Picard . The story continues and it is more powerful than ever. …and the music! Just listen . BTW: The name of this blog comes from what Captain Picard had always drunk and, as he is a little older, decaf tea is his drink now.…

Trust your gut!

2019-11-11

I have been wondering about my future in tech for a while now. Usually, when I talked to someone about it, the conclusion was that the next meaningful step is project management (which on most occasions means people management). I always felt that it was not a path for me. So, what else is there? I know I want to be close to technology, I want to do my own research, I want to solve real problems and provide solutions with real-life examples and I want to share my findings and knowledge with others - especially in our organisation, I want to create.…