Bought a Year-Long License for GoLand

Preslav Rachev in golang, intellij, ide, jetbrains, tools | 29 Aug, 2019
NOTE: This is not a paid product endorsement. I’m just a happy customer. I have recently bought a full license of GoLand for a year. The trial served me well for a few months, but the IDE shutting down automatically after every 30 minutes of work, became way too annoying. I know, I shouldn’t rely on an IDE for writing Go, when VS Code or Vim would have worked just fine.

Reduce Struct Size by Laying out Attributes Accordingly

Preslav Rachev in optimization, tips, struct, golang | 27 Aug, 2019
Many thanks to @themaour for sharing this tip on Twitter TIL that in Go, struct size depends on how underlying types were defined. struct { a bool b int32 c string d string } The size of the struct above is is different from the one down below struct { b int32 c string d string a bool } Why is that? Well, think of memory as consisting of segments of certain size, where, if the amount of data you fill the segment with is bigger than the current remainder of the segment, the data will get written onto the next segment.

Mind the Frog

Preslav Rachev in | 23 Aug, 2019
If you put a frog in a frying pan, it will quickly jump out. Yet, if you put the frog in cold water and slowly heat, the frog will enjoy the warmth until it’s too late to escape. We have all heard that story, but how many of us can admit that we play the frog on a daily basis? Especially at work, people tend to put a lot more focus on what they are working on and rather, avoid having a say on how the rest of the organization moves forward.

đź—’ 21 Aug, 2019

A quote from “Without their Permission” by Alexis Ohanian

We like to think that real talent always has a way of getting noticed. Harrison Ford was a self-taught professional carpenter when he as hired to build cabinets in the home of George Lucas, who cast him in American Graffiti and set him on a course that led to Indiana Jones. If Ford hadn’t picked up the right hammer or taken another job, Solo would’ve ended up saying “I love you, too”, instead of “I know.”

đź—’ 18 Aug, 2019

One of the best podcasts interviews I have listened to in the past couple of months, if not during the past year. Guy Raz sits down together with Tobias LĂĽtke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. You might not have heard of Shopify, but surely, if you have bought anything online during the past few years, which did not come form Amazon, you most certainly have used its flagship product.

Out of his passion for snowboarding, Tobias has managed to build a market leader in online sales software. Yet, I was amazed at how humble his whole attitude is. This is one trait I can directly trace to his German roots.

Fun fact: Tobias was one of the early adopters of Ruby on Rails, and as a result, Shopify is one of the largest sites using it nowadays, and a major flagship showcase, together with Basecamp.

Listen to the whole show:

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Source: - https://www.npr.org
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đź—’ 17 Aug, 2019

All of my Vue.js apps are being developed by proxying API calls to a remote server. This is why one of the first things I do with a new Vue.js app is to st up a vue.config.js file:

module.exports = {
  devServer: {
    proxy: {
      "/": {
        target: "https://remote-server.com",
        changeOrigin: true
      }
    }
  }
};

When calling yarn serve, I get the following message flashing in the developer console:

The connection to ws://remote-server.com was interrupted while the page was loading.

The app seems running and proxying to the remote API works just fine, but this annoying message obliterates everything else in the developer console. Thankfully, there is an easy way to get rid of it. Simply, add a ws: false to the configuration:

module.exports = {
  devServer: {
    proxy: {
      "/": {
        target: "https://remote-server.com",
        changeOrigin: true,
        ws: false
      }
    }
  }
};

đź—’ 16 Aug, 2019

Japanese websites don’t look like trash because the designers wanted to do this. They look this way because the Japanese audiences like this. They like the huge and distracting flashing banners. They like the overwhelming amount of text. They like what you and I might call crass and unpolished advertising masquerading as website content.

Why doesn’t Japan excel in software as they did in hardware?

Ah… Finally. My time has come.Where to begin?In Japan software development is not held to the same standard as other engineering positions.Japan has always had a custom where every year, new university graduates in their thousands march through giant career fairs searching for a job. This is something I call the March of the Penguins - every one of them is adorned with a new black suit with a pristine white shirt.There the companies will take their resumes, interview them and perhaps extend an invitation to the next interview. None of these companies care about what you studied or what your passions are. They might perk up if they hear that you are from one of the top flight schools (Todai, Keio, Waseda, Tokyo Tech et al).The whole idea here is that everything you need to know about doing your job will be taught to you.Now I know people working at somewhat (emphasis on somewhat) internationalized companies like Mercari or Rakuten (the Japanese eBay and Amazon respectively) will tell you that this is not how tech companies hire.The sad truth is that they do. While there are enough foreigners who will stand up to being told to hire and train clueless graduates and mold them into proper software developers in more international companies - the huge majority of software development firms don't operate like that.Naturally, many Japanese software development firms have engineering teams of pitiful quality.Software development is looked at as any other skill that can be picked up in a few months to a year: accounting, secretarial work, project management, business analysis etc.They don't speak EnglishNaturally when you cannot read or speak English, the tools you use to develop software as well as the methods you use to develop them will be those that have managed to percolate downwards from English sources due to the magnanimity of people willing to volunteer their time to translate documentation and articles.At any given time, the cutting edge of software development in Japan is 6 months to 7 years behind the rest of the world.Software development is a reversed pyramid schemeMost technology consulting firms who are awarded contracts do not actually have developers - or have only a handful at hand. They will sub-contract their work to firms down the totem pole who will in turn sub-sub-contract their work to a lesser firm.The actual developer working on your product could be a sub-contract 5 contract levels removed from you.Good luck managing changes in business requirements.All this works because the people who award the contracts are as technologically illiterate as the ones proposing them. If there ever was an apropos time to use the word circlejerk this would be it.Consumers have extremely conservative tastesAnyone asking this question by now will have seen the absolutely antediluvian website designs that are still being employed by Japanese firms. (Behold the largest online travel agency site in Japan: www.jalan.net).We have actually done user testing and A/B testing with non-trivial sample sizes.Japanese websites don't look like trash because the designers wanted to do this. They look this way because the Japanese audiences like this. They like the huge and distracting flashing banners. They like the overwhelming amount of text. They like what you and I might call crass and unpolished advertising masquerading as website content.So you can either create modern designs that will bring in international attention, but alienate domestic users, or serve your existing customers as you have been doing for decades.That's an easy choice for many companies.

Source: - https://www.quora.com

X509: Certificate Signed by Unknown Authority (Running a Go App Inside a Docker Container)

Preslav Rachev in docker, tips, golang | 11 Aug, 2019
If you ever get the following message: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority While running your Go app in a Docker container, there is a chance that you might not have the necessary trusted certificates installed in your Docker container. Assuming that you run your Go apps in lightweight containers, based on Scratch or Alpine, you will have to add the certificates yourselves. On Alpine, this can be done using the default package installer:

Mixtape Retrospective: Time to Split the Monolith?

Preslav Rachev in podcasting, mixtape, go, golang, project | 3 Aug, 2019
I have recently made my project Mixtape open to the world. Mixtape is a search and discovery platform for podcasts, built exclusively using Go. I decided to use Go primarily because of its compiler’s ability to deliver small, self-contained executables with close-to-metal native performance and extremely low memory footprint. It was also a way to battle-test the stack and figure out where and how it will benefit future projects in my portfolio.