James Simas

I run Unifi network gear in my house.

A coworker turned me onto this lovely technique the other day.

I wore Invisalign braces from January of 2022 to early 2023.

Have you ever been developing on a feature branch and needed to look at a separate branch on the same repo?

Derek Sivers recently wrote a post explaining how he backups his computers.

I am a lifelong learner working in lovely Seattle, Washington as a software developer.

It is often useful to run a subset of the tests in a Go project.

Today I needed to use the maximum unsigned 64-bit integer value possible in Golang.

I learned something new from Julia Evans today.

Today I learned about Go build tags.

Now that I’ve been writing Golang for a while, when I start a new project, I typically know the sort of layout I’m looking for.

I was not very familiar with checking an error’s type in Golang, so I spent a few minutes learning about it today.

I’ve also been thinking more about unnecessary allocations in my Go code and how to avoid them by pre-declaring the length of a slice up front.

I recently went through How To Use Templates in Go to refresh my memory on Golang templates.

While watching a talk by Rob Pike I learned today something about Goroutines which surprised me: Goroutines outlive their calling function.

Go 1.18 added a feature to easily get the Git commit version that the binary was built from.

The other day I ran into a situation where I wanted my function to block until it received data from a Go channel.

Example 1 In the below code, <-messages will block until it gets something on the channel.

At work, I’ve been using both Golang and Ruby to render Nomad jobspec files in a consistent manner across environments.

These are useful and I’m putting them here so I can find them easily wherever I am.

Last week, I was working on some Python at work and I found myself wishing for an equivalent to Golang’s structs.

I’ve been a bit confused for a while over when a map in Golang gets created with a value of nil (its zero value) and when it does not, so I’m writing this to help me remember.

My wife and I recently went to the Hawaiin islands for a few days for a vacatoin.

Go has a built-in HTTP server in net/http.

The other day, I was linting my Go code with golangci-lint when I got this error: File is not `goimports`-ed (goimports) I examined the file and found nothing amiss, but the linter insisted something was wrong.

This post documents the high level concepts I need to remember about *nix Load Average.

Old and new workflows My dev workflow used to look like this: Write some code and save it Change to my Terminal window Up-arrow to find my command to run unit tests (typically make test) Press Enter Wait for tests to run and examine test output This worked

Go normally uses pass-by-value for function calls.

Constants syntax I always have a hard time remembering the syntax of declaring constants in Go.

You can open the a file from the macOS CLI with the command open.

After working with Go for a while, one of the biggest drawbacks to Python for me is that the types of parameters to functions and methods are completely opaque without good documentation.

Golang has mutexes (short for mutually exclusion) to manage concurrent access to a shared object via multiple goroutines.

Working with Goroutines is simple.

In Go, it’s pretty easy to write an anonymous function. package main import "fmt" func main() { func(s string){ fmt.Println("s is:", s) }("hello world") } Running the above code produces: $ go run main.go s is: hello world You can even assign the…

In Go 1.18, we get access to Genrics.

defer in go is used to run a function later on.

When declaring function parameters in Go, you must type the incoming data.

Today I accidentally created a file whose name had a newline character in it.

I recently was having to work with Ansible for several days to deploy changes globally across prod.

Today I was using Ansible’s tower_job_template module in a playbook.

Setting up my blog has always been easy.

Today a coworker posed an interesting question to me.

If you’ve known me for a while, you probably know that I have a soap box.

I’ve always been a bit hit-or-miss with sed and haven’t understood it to the level to which I wanted.

A few days ago, I finished my Digital Declutter Experiment.

Lists (Continued) Appending to lists is simple with lappend: Note: lappend takes just the name of the list.

I recently finished “Digital Essentialism” by Cal Newport.

I’ve been improving my knowledge of TCL since I’m starting to work with a lot of iRules (which are based on TCL) in my current position.

In no particular order, here are some things which delight me: Books & Blogs Cal Newport’s books and blog This man has significantly improved my working life and made me more effective in general.

I’ve tried this blog thing before.