Ukiah Smith

Often times we need to unmarshal upstream data with unique constraints. Such as custom data types, or custom parsing of specific formats. Using the standard library could be impractical, and handling long structs manually can be tedious; however there is an alternative.

Yikes, I am behind in my reading goal. It is lat in the month of January and I am not far enough along in my reading to hit my goal. I am reading the first book to reach my goal that is my New Year’s resolution to read twelve books this year. It is a small step up from the seven books I read last year. The challenge though is that I am already behind.

Hugo is a great static site generator. It is crazy fast and has tons of options, but one thing I had not been able to discover was how to use variable data in make, my build tool, and pass it to a Hugo template. I wanted a way to create unique CSS filenames, and use those filenames in my Hugo templates.

Sometimes I want a quick way to build some web pages. A way that does not require installing a lot of servers locally, but is still better than opening the file directly in my web browser.

When I start a new web project I break it up into small steps. These steps form a natural set of milestones, and helps me to reason about the project as a whole. Focusing on each step helps me make progress on the entire project.

As my digital documents grows and expands I want to ensure that my documents and data will be available to me far into the future.

One of the challenges of managing all my data is organizing and backing up the many many files I have.

I want to save almost all of my files and documents, but A lot of them I suspect I will rarely access in the future. Or maybe I will never access them. In order to reduce the overall number of files I have to deal with I want to combine and compress these files into an individual archive. Still, I want to ensure that if I ever want to revisit these files they would be safe and accessible even if that is years in the future.

Tmux is a wonderful tool to increase my productivity by multiplexing windows and apps to a single terminal. I use it all the time when working on a project to organize my tools, and quickly switch between them.

One things I do these days is create a shell script to launch, and customize, my tmux session for the specific project that I am working on. This give me quick access to a complex setup, allowing me to jump into a project and get moving quickly.

Go has a robust JSON library for consuming and outputting JSON. The standard json.Marshal() and json.Unmarshal() functions do a great job of aligning primitive types and converting them from Go into JSON, and vise versa. Beyond the basic types you will have to create custom marshaling methods on your types and write some logic to handle the conversion process. We will go over writing these custom methods for types that contain time and URL data.

With most variables in Go we can declared them in a couple of different ways. Using the var keyword, initialize them as we declare them with the := operator; or using the new or make keywords.

Most variables can be declared with var, which only reserves storage for a named variable. If no assignment accompanies the statement, the variable is set to it’s zero value. Using var to declare a channel crates a nil channel. The underlying header is created, but there is no backing data structure. If we use the make keyword we reserve storage, initializes memory, and create the backing header for the specified type.

There is something small and tiny that I feel I am missing about Test Driven Development. I understand the basic principle of the matter; write a test that fails, then write the code to make it pass, rinse and repeat; red, green, then refactor. Knowing that basic truth of what TDD is has not translated into actually being able to use it as a practice in my day to day coding.

How we name html class names is important. Naming in general is important. A class name is a little story we can tell ourselves. Later in the development process we can quickly and easily know what an element is for based on the name. We learn from a class name what something is, and what we can expect from it.

Semantic class naming is a style in which we use class names that describe what an element is, or it’s intended purpose, rather than how it looks.

From the fmt package; the Scanf function is used to read input from stdin. When you run this snippet of code the main() function will wait for user input a string, a number, and a second string. Which it puts into variables, and then uses to print some information.

Scanf woul be used when you want to write a command line program that requires user input during the running process.

Right now there is a discussion thread on the golang-dev mailing list about formalizing how Go manages dependencies. The Go Team is putting forward that Go use vendoring to manage dependencies, and asked the community to formalize a configuration format that tools can use to manage vendored code.

For sometime the Go team has been very passive in directing how Go manages dependencies. When Go was first released to the public the only mechanism or best practice was to use go get which is not much more than a simple tool to fetch code.