Let’s talk business—independent business, that is. What’s the cost of being the boss? Some more hard-learned lessons from my own horrible career.
Cryptography in Go: AES explained
AES is the modern standard encryption algorithm, but how does it work? Where does it come from? Let’s kick the tyres with a high-level overview of AES internals.
Best Go books for 2024
What are the best Go books for 2024? Read my (relatively) unbiased recommendations for the Go books you should absolutely buy and read right now, whether you’re a beginner or expert Gopher.
Being a good co-worker is your job now
In the final part of this series on the world of work, we’ll talk about how not to suck at meetings.
Not a real developer
In the second part of my tell-all memoir, we find out why I was constitutionally unsuited to employment in a structured environment, or indeed any environment.
People skills for developers
In the second part of this series on career skills for software engineers, we’ll look at how to deal with that trickiest of species: human beings.
My horrible career
Dev advocate Zack Proser grilled me lightly about my career, and why I haven’t taken any of my own advice. Read the full interview, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
You can do this: surviving day one
It’s day one of your new job as a developer. What should you expect? How should you act? Will you survive “max Q“?
Finding bugs with fuzzing
In the thrilling conclusion to our fuzz testing series, we’ll use Go’s fuzzer to find a real bug in our code, and also to verify the fix.
Writing a Go fuzz target
Let’s continue our exploration of fuzz testing in Go with a look at how to write a fuzz target for a (nearly) realistic function. This time we’ll try to detect a common kind of bug involving a confusion between runes and bytes.
Fuzz tests in Go
Fuzz testing is Go’s clever way of generating new test inputs that you didn’t think of—and that may flush out some hidden bugs. Stand by for things to get a little fuzzy!
The Tao of Go
What is the Tao of Go, and how can we work with it, like a surfer going with the waves instead of struggling against them? By being kind, simple, humble, and not striving; here’s how.
Random testing in Go
Choosing good test cases for our Go programs can be a bit hit-and-miss. What if we could automate that process? Let’s talk about randomisation, property-based testing, and Go’s built-in fuzz testing feature.
The adapter pattern in Go
How do you test a database without a database? Don't worry, this isn't one of those Zen puzzles. I have something more practical, but equally enlightening, in mind. Let’s use the adapter pattern to solve the riddle.
A generic Set type in Go
To celebrate the first anniversary of generics in Go, let’s build something practical and useful: a generic Set type, and add some neat methods to it. Ready for fun?
From packages to commands
In Part 2 of a series about writing packages, not programs, we see how to test a package that prints to the terminal, and use the result to build our “hello, world” CLI tool.
Write packages, not programs
Go has a great standard library. What if we think about our work not merely as building one-off programs, but instead contributing packages to the universal Go library?
The gentle art of code review
Could we give and receive code reviews with kindness, gentleness, humility, and compassion? Can we make a point without making an enemy? Let’s go line by line.
A career ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
Go’s best-kept secret: executable examples
Did you know that Go lets us provide executable code examples as part of our documentation? It’s pretty neat. Let’s take a tour of this useful feature and see how it works.