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Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
Full disclosure: my employer makes a Slack alternative. All my concerns about the use of Slack type chat services apply equally to its competitors, including my employer’s.
Dave Cheney
Here’s a small quiz derived from some incorrect advice from an AI coding assistant.
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Visit dave.cheney.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2012 – Jun 2020
Software Engineering 25Programming Languages 25Systems & Performance 9Career & Management 6History & Retro Computing 2Society, Policy & Culture 1
2
Clear is better than clever
This article is based on my GopherCon Singapore 2019 presentation. In the presentation I referenced material from my post on declaring variables and my GolangUK 2017 presentation on SOLID design . For brevity those parts of the talk have been elided from this article. If you prefer, you can watch the recording of the…
3
The Zen of Go
This article was derived from my GopherCon Israel 2020 presentation. It’s also quite long. If you’d prefer a shorter version, head over to the-zen-of-go.netlify.com .
4
Go 1.7 toolchain improvements
This is a progress report on the Go toolchain improvements during the 1.7 development cycle. All measurements were taken using a Thinkpad x220, Core i5-2520M, running Ubuntu 14.04 linux.
5
The ‘here is’ key
The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal is a very important artefact in computing history.
6
Taking Go modules for a spin
Update: Since this post was written, Go 1.11beta2 has been released. I’ve updated the setup section to reflect this. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the reasoning behind storing the Go module cache in $GOPATH . I’ve included his response inline.
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Go’s hidden pragmas
This is an article about compiler directives; or as they are commonly known, pragmas. It’s derived from a talk of a similar name that I gave last year at GopherChina in Shanghai.
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Be wary of functions which take several parameters of the same type
A good example of a simple looking, but hard to use correctly, API is one which takes two or more parameters of the same type. Let’s compare two function signatures:
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Never edit a method, always rewrite it?
At a recent RubyConf, Chad Fowler presented his ideas for writing software systems that mirror the process of continual replacement observed in biological systems.
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How the Go runtime implements maps efficiently without generics
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
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Understand Go pointers
This post is for programmers coming to Go who are unfamiliar with the idea of pointers or a pointer type in Go.
12
Cross compilation just got better in Go 1.5
Cross compilation is one of Go’s headline features. I’ve written about it a few times , and others have taken this work and built better tooling around it.
13
Go 1.3 Linker Improvements
Go obtains much of its compilation speed from the Plan 9 compiler, of which it is a direct descendant. The Plan 9 toolchain deferred much of the work traditionally performed by a compiler to the linking stage and its performance was summarised in section 8 of this paper
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Go 1.1 performance improvements
This is the first in a series of articles analysing the performance improvements in the Go 1.1 release.
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SOLID Go Design
This post is based on the text of my GolangUK keynote delivered on the 18th of August 2016. A recording of the talk is available on YouTube .
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What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
17
Visualising the Go garbage collector
gcvis is a simple way of visualising the operation of the garbage collector within a Go process. Here is a screenshot of it in operation. The rest of this article explores how gcvis works and how to interpret its results.
18
Go stack traces and the errors package
A few months ago I gave a presentation on my philosophy for error handling . In the talk I introduced a small errors package designed to support the ideas presented in the talk.
19
A whirlwind tour of Go’s runtime environment variables
The Go runtime, in addition to providing the usual services of garbage collection, goroutine scheduling, timers, network polling and so forth, contains facilities to enable extra debugging output and even alter the behaviour of the runtime itself.
20
Things that make Go fast
Anthony Starks has remixed my original Google Present based slides using his fantastic Deck presentation tool. You can check out his remix over on his blog, mindchunk.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/remixing-with-deck .
21
Building a high performance JSON parser
JSON is important, damn near everything that we do as programmers or operators involves JSON at some point. JSON decoding is expensive, if your product talks JSON then performance of marshalling data in and out of JSON is important. This is a talk about designing an efficient replacement for encoding/json.Decoder .
22
Let the callers of your API control allocations
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
23
There is no pass by reference in Go
My post on pointers provoked a lot of debate about maps and pass by reference semantics. This post is a response to those debates.
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Go and Simplicity Debt Redux
In my previous post I discussed my concerns the additional complexity adding generics or immutability would bring to a future Go 2.0. As it was an opinion piece, I tried to keep it around 500 words. This post is an exploration of the most important (and possibly overlooked) point of that post.
25
Another go at the Next Big Language
2007 was a different time for languages. While Java held the popular crown, the mainstream programming community were still coming to terms with Java 6. Released 3 months earlier, it was very much an evolution of the Java 5 watershed. Its arrival heralded the end of life for Java 1.4 and represented an opportunity to…
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Go’s runtime C to Go rewrite, by the numbers
The start of September brings a close to the Go 1.4 merge window . From now until the release in December, only bug fixes and tweaks will be accepted.
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Go and Simplicity Debt
Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.
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Maybe adding generics to Go is about syntax after all
This is a short response to the recently announced Go 2 generics draft proposals
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How Go uses Go to build itself
This post is based on a talk I gave to the Sydney Go users group in mid April 2013 describing the Go build process.
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Struct composition with Go
This is a quick Friday blog post to talk about a recent experience I had working on a piece Juju code that needed to capture the data being sent over a net.Conn .