Unix-like pipelines for Go

Posted on 2013/04/15 by niemeyer

This weekend the proper environment settled out for sorting a pet peeve that shows up every once in a while when coding: writing logic that interacts with other applications in the system via their stdin and stdout streams is often more involved than it should be, which seems pretty ironic when sitting in front of a Unix-like system.

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Posted in Architecture, C/C++, Design, Go, Python | Leave a comment

Synchronicity: threads vs. events

Posted on 2013/03/28 by niemeyer

There are a number of common misconceptions in software development surrounding the idea of concurrency. This has been coming for decades, and some of the issues have just been reinforced one more time in an otherwise interesting post in LinkedIn’s engineering blog that recommends their development framework.

Such issues may be observed throughout the post, but can be elucidated via this short paragraph: Continue reading →

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12 years ago

Posted on 2013/03/01 by niemeyer

These ancient entries were taken from my old Advogato diary, written in my early twenties, a year after I joined the development team of Conectiva Linux. I’m copying them for historic purposes, with the content untouched. It’s curious to look back and have such details of what was going on at the time, things that feel good, and things that feel awkward such as the “Dear Diary, …” style of writing, and the amount of exclamations!!

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Introducing the Ubuntu Finder

Posted on 2013/02/20 by niemeyer

A small and fun experiment is out:

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Ethics for code reviewers

Posted on 2013/02/06 by niemeyer

In the previous post, I explored a bit how ephemeral most of the artifacts of software development processes are. One of these processes is code reviewing, which is arguably a major player in code quality, knowledge acquisition, and even team dynamics.

Even being so important, the outcome of the code review process — the review itself — tends to reach a very limited audience and have a short life time. It’ll be hard to change that picture given the nature of reviews: they are conversational, and address specific issues for the integration of a change in the project. At the same time, even if code reviews are not generally useful as permanent documentation, we can increase their value as reference material by improving the quality of those conversations. Having a good conversation has many other great side effects, of course.

As a small step in that direction, what follows are personal guidelines that I have been evolving empirically over the years as a software developer and code reviewer. They may not bring you fortune and fame, and are not always easy to apply, but hopefully they will help improving your experience as a member of your team and the value of those reviews.

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The ephemeral life of software development

Posted on 2013/02/04 by niemeyer

Lately I’ve been considering the amount of waste we produce during software development, and how to increase the amount of recycled content. I’m not talking about actual trash, though, but rather about software development artifacts.

Over the years, we’ve learned about and put in practice several means for improving the quality and success rate of projects we create or contribute to. We have practices such as sprints to get people together with high communication bandwidth; we have code reviews for sharing knowledge and improving project quality; we’ve got technical leadership roles to mentor developers and guide the progress of projects; we’ve created kanban boards and burndown charts to help people visualize what they’re going through; and so on.

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Posted in Architecture, Article, Design | 5 Comments

Baby feeding statistics with R

Posted on 2013/01/25 by niemeyer

Our son Otávio was born recently. Right in the first few days, we decided to keep tight control on the feeding times for a while, as it is an intense routine pretty unlike anything else, and obviously critical for the health of the baby. I imagined that it wouldn’t be hard to find an Android app that would do that in a reasonable way, and indeed there are quite a few. We went with Baby Care, as it has a polished interface and more features than we’ll ever use. The app also includes some basic statistics, but not enough for our needs. Luckily, though, it is able to export the data as a CSV file, and post-processing that file with the R language is easy, and allows extracting some fun facts about what the routine of a healthy baby can look like in the first month, as shown below.

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Posted in Article, Math, Mobile, R, Snippet | 1 Comment

Multi-doc transactions for MongoDB

Posted on 2012/08/22 by niemeyer

I’m glad to announce experimental support for multi-document transactions in the mgo driver that integrates MongoDB with the Go language. The support is done via a driver extension, so it works with any MongoDB release supported by the driver (>= 1.8).

Features

Here is a quick highlight list to get your brain ticking before the details:

  • Supports sharding
  • Operations may span multiple collections
  • Handles changes, inserts and removes
  • Supports pre-conditions
  • Self-healing
  • No additional locks or leases
  • Works with existing data

Let’s see what these actually mean and how the goodness is done.

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Less is more, and is not always straightforward

Posted on 2012/06/26 by niemeyer

Rob Pike just wrote an article/talk that is the best background on the origins of Go yet.

It surprises me how much his considerations match my world view pre-Go, and in a sense give me a fulfilling explanation about why I got hooked into the language. I still recall sitting in a hotel years ago with Jamu Kakar while we went through the upcoming C++0x standard (now C++11) and got perplexed about how someone could think that having details such as rvalue references and move constructors into the language specification was something reasonable.

Rob also expressed again the initial surprise that developers using languages such as Python and Ruby were more often the ones willing to migrate towards Go, rather than ones using C++, with some reasonable explanations about why that is so. While I agree with his considerations, I see Python going through the same kind of issue that caused C++ to be what it is today.

Consider this excerpt from PEP 0380 as evidence:
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Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Design, Go, Python | 5 Comments

The Easter mgo release

Posted on 2012/04/08 by niemeyer

It wasn’t just the bunny that was active over the holidays. The r2012.04.08 release of the mgo MongoDB driver for Go has just been tagged. This release is supposed to be entirely compatible with the last release, and there are some nice improvements and a few important bug fixes, so upgrading is recommended.

For the impatient, here is a quick summary of the changes performed:

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Posted in Go, MongoDB, Project | Leave a comment