Have you ever seen someone write something to the effect of “I would use Go, but I need generics”? Perhaps we can infer from this that many of the people who are pining after generics in Go are not, in fact, Go users. The inertia of “what I’m used to” comes to a violent stop when they try to use Go. People affected by this frustration interpret it as a problem with Go, that Go is missing some crucial feature - such as generics. But this lack of features is itself a feature, not a bug.

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A cool/fun intro to Wasm where you build a game for cats (catch the red laser dot) completely in Go. The fact that WASM is still considered a MVP (MAP) and that you create a game like this, without writing a single line of JS, is amazing! CanIUse is already fully green, there is nothing stopping you from building WASM powered websites and apps.

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You can search from commits, inspect indvidual files and changes in the commits, see ahead/behind commits etc. It is an alternative and interactive way to explore the commit history. Also, you can explore your current state by investigating diffs, stage your changes and commit them.

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This blog post is about Badger, the key-value database that makes it all happen under the hood, housing all Dgraph data, including Raft logs. There are many key-value store options in Go-land. Still, the Dgraph team decided to roll their own solution 18 months back. Was it a bad case of NIH? A good idea? Would they do it all over again? This article answers those questions in-depth.

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This is useful for making sure things look right before pushing your content up to GitHub for serving. It’s better than python -m http.server and the like because it handles lack of file extensions and absolute paths better. It doesn’t support Jekyll-based GitHub pages, but it will take your Markdown files and send them off to api.github.com/markdown for character-perfect rendering.

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WebSocket-capable applications can now be built very easily. As long as you can write an executable program that reads STDIN and writes to STDOUT, you can build a WebSocket server. Do it in Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash, .NET, C, Go, PHP, Java, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Expect, Awk, VBScript, Haskell, Lua, R, whatever! No networking libraries necessary. Stuff already built with this include a real-time Linux stats dashboard, an arbitrary REPL in the browser, and a tool that retrieves SQL data from a server with LiveCode. (Use at your own risk 😈)

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Dig in as Russ Cox goes deep on our software dependency problem. For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined. … Software dependencies carry with them serious risks that are too often overlooked. The shift to easy, fine-grained software reuse has happened so quickly that we do not yet understand the best practices for choosing and using dependencies effectively, or even for deciding when they are appropriate and when not. My purpose in writing this article is to raise awareness of the risks and encourage more investigation of solutions.

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Why might you want to do this? Two reasons: Fast Feedback - Rather than having to commit/push every time you want test out the changes you are making to your main.workflow file (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally. Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your main.workflow file to replace your Makefile!

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Brian Brazil: The informal design goal of the Prometheus 2.x TSDB startup was that it should take no more than about a minute. Over the past few months there’s been reports of it taking quite a bit more than this, which is a problem if your Prometheus restarts for some reason. Almost all of that time is loading the WAL (write ahead log), which are the samples in the last few hours which have yet to be compacted into a block. I finally got a chance to dig into this at the end of October, and the outcome was PR#440 which reduced CPU time by 6.5x and walltime by 4x. Let’s look at how I arrived at these improvements. I’ve been meaning to get more familiar with pprof, the Go profiling tool, as my job revolves around working on and around Go microservices. My team has been able to see the impact of the Go experts who can quickly find issues buried in a stack of profiles collected on a service. Brian’s post is a great example of 1) identifying the an issue, 2) diagnosing said issue and 3) observing the implemented improvements using pprof. His parting paragraph is particularly insightful, specifically: I did spend quite a bit of time pouring over the code, and had several dead ends such as removing the call to NumSamples, doing reading and decoding in separate threads, and a few variants of how the processWALSamples sharding worked Profiling and optimization is a mix of knowing your codebase and being able to identifying false leads. A tool like pprof is invaluable when identifying both issues and improvements in a measurable way.

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Front-enders should check this out! Johan Brandhorst reviews the history of gRPC in the browser, the state of things today, and thoughts on the future of gRPC-Web. gRPC-Web is an excellent choice for web developers. It brings the portability, performance, and engineering of a sophisticated protocol into the browser, and marks an exciting time for frontend developers! So far the benefits have largely only been available to mobile app and backend developers, whilst frontend developers have had to continue to rely on JSON REST interfaces as their primary means of information exchange. However, with the release of gRPC-Web, gRPC is poised to become a valuable addition in the toolbox of frontend developers.

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Tilt makes it possible to develop all your microservices locally in Kubernetes while collaborating with your team. You define a Tiltfile that describes how your services fit together (which is supposed to be pretty straight forward if you already have a Dockerfile and a Kubernetes config), then share it with your team. Everyone runs tilt up and the app is up and running on their localhost. No more “it worked on my machine” – everything runs in containers so the right dependencies are always there. Tilt updates with container optimization tricks & best practices, so that even complex projects update in seconds.

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This is cool and something I never even considered a possibility. The author also wrote a pair of great blog posts on the subject: Animated QR data transfer with Gomobile and Gopherjs Fountain codes and animated QR.

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Brad Fitzpatrick is going back to the drawing board on Go’s net/http Client and Transport. The linked repo is in its “problem collection” phase, but it’s worth following (or getting involved) now before the actual solution begins to take shape. What’s wrong with the status quo? The list of problems is extensive (and growing).

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Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate, as it does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.

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Discover ways to shrink your Docker image size by exploring its contents broken down by layer.

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You can pair with a friend without setting up a proxy server, debug servers behind NATs, and more. WebTTY also works in-browser. You can connect to a WebTTY session from this static page: https://maxmcd.github.io/webtty

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This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

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The emulator can run the majority of GB games and some CGB games. There is also colour and sound support. This was built as a development exercise and is very much a WIP, but that shouldn’t stop you from hopping in there and playing some Link’s Awakening. 😉

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Last week, Admiralty open-sourced multicluster-controller, a Go library for building hybrid and multicloud Kubernetes operators. It is the equivalent of operator-sdk or kubebuilder, but for multiple clusters. It is actually a thin layer around parts of controller-runtime, the library that powers kubebuilder. It can be used to control custom resources (defined by CRDs) across clusters.

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Meet up a.k.a. the Ultimate Plumber: The main goal of the Ultimate Plumber is to help interactively and incrementally explore textual data in Linux, by making it easier to quickly build complex pipelines, thanks to a fast feedback loop. This is achieved by boosting any typical Linux text-processing utils such as grep, sort, cut, paste, awk, wc, perl, etc., etc., by providing a quick, interactive, scrollable preview of their results.

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Biscuit is a monolithic, POSIX-subset operating system kernel in Go for x86-64 CPUs. It was written to study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel with a common style of architecture. With ~38k commits and 8+ years of dev, this has been a massive effort. Find the research paper right here.

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If you want to see what the landscape is of companies who are using Go, spread the word and encourage folks to participate in the 2018 Go company questionnaire. On the Go blog: Please help by participating in a 7-minute company questionnaire. Who? If you are in a position to share details like “company name,” “if your company is hiring Go developers,” and “reasons your team or company adopted Go” then please help us by taking this company questionnaire. We only need one response per company (or per department for larger companies). If you aren’t the right person, please forward this onto the right person at your company.

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What happens when you boot up a Pod? What happens to a Service before it is allocated a public IP address? How often is a Deployment's status changing? I have no clue, but kubespy will help answer those questions in real time.

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Having its own declarative language, ferret abstracts away technical details and complexity of the underlying technologies, helping to focus on the data itself.

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RoadRunner is an open source (MIT licensed), high-performance PHP application server, load balancer and process manager. It supports running as a service with the ability to extend its functionality on a per-project basis. RoadRunner is written in Go, and can be used to replace the class Nginx+FPM setup, boasting “much greater performance”. I’d love to see some benchmarks. Better yet, I’d love to see someone use this in production for a bit and write up their experience.

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