For the love of programming...
It is no secret that nobody loves Go's error handling. We pretend to love it, we tolerate it, but deep down we know that feeling. It is not the if err != nil that I'm interested in today; that is one editor snippet away. It is how much we lose in the...
Docker containers are now ubiquitous in web development workflows. I often use docker compose to run services that I need during development and in test environments. I often have to wait for a service running in a docker container to be ready before...
Is it better to use a shared global logger and negotiate settings with every module, or to use private logger instances customised to taste? For most applications, logging is a cross-cutting concern. Logging is needed across the application, but the ...
Go's log/slog standard library package provides everything you need to get started with structured logging. It has been thoughtfully designed to support both library authors and program authors. The first article of this series was intended to show t...
Go 1.21 was released in August 2023 and brought several improvements, structured logging via the log/slog package being one. I had waited for this release and delayed a proposal at work in anticipation. Such was my joy at the release that I quickly d...
A Twitter mutual recently tweeted about issues with mocks in his codebase. I was surprised by his tweet; I used to think that Scala users have it all nice and tidy 😅. Coincidentally, I had just had my day's worth of mocking problems in Go. It turns ...
When writing unit tests, we often use functions and methods to factor our test suites into coherent parts for readability. To common parts we factor out are creation methods and custom assertions. We use creation methods to group setup logic into a l...
Embracing contract programming for interfaces
A fair amount of software development involves interacting with APIs. I want to present some issues that I considered for a tagging API that I recently designed. I intend to only present the thinking process by discussing what capabilities each decis...
