matttproud.com (blog)

I am writing this mostly for posterity in case other people are running into this problem: I’ve been using a Logitech Trackman Marble Mouse Trackball (p/n 810-000767) for many years in the X Window System1 — Linux and OpenBSD.

I’ve been using Jujutsu (jj) for a few months now and am generally liking it.

I am coming off from surgery right now and have some time on my hands, so I wanted to share a story about a learning experience.

Today, a small UI improvement I made to Go’s pkgsite tool was deployed to production. pkgsite is the tool that can be run locally to serve documentation, and it’s also the binary that serves http://pkg.go.dev.

I found myself wanting an tool recently, and I was honestly surprised that none already existed to do this.

Organizing source code is a critical skill in software mastery, and this remains true in Go.

There’s a fun trope on the Fediverse about the absurdity of using continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) on a personal web site: Post by @philgyford@mastodon.social View on Mastodon It’s a cute thought, but the critique has a lot of purc…

If you asked me where I fall in the AI camp, I’m in the skeptical-but-curious quadrant (example).

I came across something that caught my eye today.

Today, driven by annoyance, I refactor-extracted a small set of test helper code found in various private personal projects around the topic of golden file management into a dedicated Go module: github.com/matttproud/goldentest (API documentation).

I’d like to share a design pattern with Go that I really find particularly elegant.

If you’ve ever read the Go FAQ, it contains a section on testing frameworks that features some provocative language that I’ll quote verbatim below: A related point is that testing frameworks tend to develop into mini-languages of their own, with condition…

Suppose one day you receive a bug report about your code (func Encode) and want to build a test to verify the fix or recreate the problem.

Scenario Let’s suppose your boss tasks you with the problem of building a data upload service for blobs.

I used to be a rather prolific shell script user; I knew the ins and outs of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by heart.

One of the things I enjoy about my line of work is how much reading is involved.

Today my mother passed away after a battle with cancer.

If you’ve spent much time in Zürich and use public transport, you may have seen a peculiarity like this before: Destination: Unterterzen Notice what it is?

Happy Halloween.

Still from Front 242: Headhunter A constant trope in my life has been feeling like I was born five-to-ten years too late.

I need to get this off my chest.

It dawned on me recently how long I’ve been out of the role of Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

If you read my Go Error Propagation and API Contracts article, you may have noticed that I intimated at a typology of errors.

I have a couple of hundred small Git repositories for small projects and research, and that number is only going to grow (let’s be honest).

About a year ago, I purchased a house in the United States in the Twin Cities.

I want to open with a premise: North American motorists driving in Europe are probably ill-prepared to operate a motor vehicle safely due an inadequate understanding of the local rules of the road.

This is a smaller piece that I broke off from a larger article.

Mention the city of Zürich to someone, and you’re likely to get a somewhat off-base reactive invective: Bankers Stuffy Boring Expensive Overblown City Slickers Maybe all of the above?

One of the things I had been curious how to do in Hugo but readily couldn’t find out was have the tag listings on pages provide a count of the number of pages that also belong to the respective tag.

Pop quiz, hot shot: what is the behavior of func f (as defined below) when it is called from a bare gRPC method or HTTP handler as go f(ctx) using the context.Context provided to the handler?

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend.

A recent post by Julia Evans prompted me to share a little trick I have been using in UNIX-like shells for a significant part of my life.

Conventionally software engineers have reasoned with how expensive a test is by classifying how it exercises the system under test (SUT): unit, integration, or functional.

I’ve lived outside the United States for well over a decade now.

It’s pretty late in the 2024 United States election cycle.

I’ve been thinking about errors in Go quite a bit lately and what has been bothering me about the practice of error design and usage in the community.

For purposes of continued learning, I have been futzing around with Rust a little bit in my spare time.

I need to be honest: I find the documentation for R frustrating, particularly the API documentation.

Premise Before we start out, I want to contextualize what you are about to read.

It’s no secret: if you’re viewing this page, you can see that I am a fan of the Go Fonts.

I want to make a short plug for ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis by Wickham, Hadley, et. al.

I was recently doing several searches on the public World Wide Web around some niche technical topics.

I would like to propose a set of neologisms for the Go Programming Language based on emergent language use: context awareness: noun, the state of an API being cognizant of and respecting the semantics of the context API.

The context API is a critical foundation for modern Go development.

Growing up in Tornado Alley proper, I have had a life-long fascination with weather.

Those who know me — I think — would say not say I am lazy.

I’ve found myself reaching for a set of terms with increasing frequency in recent years when writing technical documentation and providing design feedback.

If you’re of a certain generation, you may remember a period of time when web sites on the World Wide Web may have featured a snippet of text like this at the bottom of their web sites: $Id: index.html,v 1.1 1999/10/07 13:45:15 john Exp $ And if you’re of…

A web log is a web log.

One stands on the shoulders of giants.