Bazaar, the git way

Posted on 2012/01/16 by niemeyer

Back at the Ubuntu Platform Rally last week, I’ve pestered some of the Bazaar team with questions about co-location of branches in the same directory with Bazaar. The great news is that this seems to be really coming for the next release, with first-class integration of the feature in the command set. Unfortunately, though, it’s not quite yet ready for prime time, or even for I’m-crazy-and-want-this-feature time.

Some background on why this feature turns out to be quite important right now may be interesting, since life with Bazaar in the past years hasn’t really brought that up as a blocker. Continue reading →

Posted in Conference, Design, Go, Project, Python, RCS | 8 Comments

Good concurrency changes the game

Posted on 2011/12/12 by niemeyer

A long time before I seriously got into using distributed version control systems (DVCS) such as Bazaar and Git for developing software, it was already well known to me how the mechanics of these systems worked, and why people benefited from them. That said, it wasn’t until I indeed started to use DVCS tools that I understood how much my daily workflow around code bases would be changed and improved.

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Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | 5 Comments

Launchpad + Rietveld == HappyCodeReviews

Posted on 2011/11/17 by niemeyer

In the past week, I’ve finally stopped to fix something that I’ve been wishing for years: inline code reviews in Launchpad. Well, I haven’t exactly managed fix it in Launchpad, but the integration with Rietveld feels nice enough to be relatively painless.

The integration is done using the lbox tool, that was developed in Go using the lpad package for the communication with Launchpad, and a newly written rietveld package for communication with Rietveld.

If you want to join me in my happines, here are the few steps to get that working for you as well.

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Posted in Go, Patch, Project, RCS | 3 Comments

Death of goroutines under control

Posted on 2011/10/09 by niemeyer

Certainly one of the reasons why many people are attracted to the Go language is its first-class concurrency aspects. Features like communication channels, lightweight processes (goroutines), and proper scheduling of these are not only native to the language but are integrated in a tasteful manner.

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Posted in Architecture, Design, Erlang, Go, Project, Snippet, Test | 8 Comments

The Rubber Boots

Posted on 2011/08/27 by niemeyer

(originally posted on G+)

Yesterday I was just reading Armin Rigo’s post related to having Software Transactional Memory in PyPy. If you haven’t heard of Armin before, I’ll just set the context by telling you that he’s one of the most amazing developers I’ve ever met. I also appreciate the context of the post. Armin is trying to address the long standing problem of the Global Interpreter Lock in Python.

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Posted in Architecture, Design, Python | Leave a comment

Ensemble, Go, and MongoDB at Canonical

Posted on 2011/08/05 by niemeyer

About 1 year after development started in Ensemble, today the stars finally aligned just the right way (review queue mostly empty, no other pressing needs, etc) for me to start writing the specification about the repository system we’ve been jointly planning for a long time. This is the system that the Ensemble client will communicate with for discovering which formulas are available, for publishing new formulas, for obtaining formula files for deployment, and so on.

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Posted in Architecture, C/C++, Cloud, Design, Go, PostgreSQL, Project, Python | 7 Comments

The job market for Go

Posted on 2011/08/05 by niemeyer

I know there’s a lot of curiosity regarding Go’s growth and usage, and some people often ponder about whether they should invest on it since they don’t see hundreds of jobs in public sites, so would like to point something obvious, but which people often don’t realize:

You are responsible for the market.

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Posted in Go | 1 Comment

Cut the rope, a tablet is NOT a laptop

Posted on 2011/07/19 by niemeyer

Back in 2009 I quickly talked about the obvious revolution in computing that was rolling in the form of mobile phone as computer, and mentioned as well the fact that touch-based interfaces were going to dominate the marketplace because of that.

Move forward a couple of years, and last week I got my first tablet, running Android (a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, if you’re curious). I didn’t know exactly why I needed one, but being in the tech industry I always have that nice excuse for myself of buying things early on for learning about the experience of using them. Last night, I could clearly see this can be a real claim in some cases (in others it’s just an excuse for the wife).

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Posted in Article, Design, Mobile, Puzzle | 3 Comments

Efficient algorithm for expanding circular buffers

Posted on 2010/12/23 by niemeyer

Circular buffers are based on an algorithm well known by any developer who’s got past the “Hello world!” days. They offer a number of key characteristics with wide applicability such as constant and efficient memory use, efficient FIFO semantics, etc.

One feature which is not always desired, though, it the fact that circular buffers traditionally will either overwrite the last element, or raise an overflow error, since they are generally implemented as a buffer of constant size. This is an unwanted property when one is attempting to consume items from the buffer and it is not an option to blindly drop items, for instance.

This post presents an efficient (and potentially novel) algorithm for implementing circular buffers which preserves most of the key aspects of the traditional version, while also supporting dynamic expansion when the buffer would otherwise have its oldest entry overwritten. It’s not clear if the described approach is novel or not (most of my novel ideas seem to have been written down 40 years ago), so I’ll publish it below and let you decide.

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Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 4 Comments

Vector clock support for Go

Posted on 2010/12/21 by niemeyer

One more Go library oriented towards building distributed systems hot off the presses: govclock. This one offers full vector clock support for the Go language. Vector clocks allow recording and analyzing the inherent partial ordering of events in a distributed system in a comfortable way.

The following features are offered by govclock, in addition to basic event tracking:

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Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Go, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment