Archive of posts filed under the Programming category.

Question to fellow programmers: Do you like auto-complete?

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I’ve always found auto-complete to be an insanity-inducing feature in my programming text editor. Inevitably, it causes me to type the wrong thing, or hit TAB too many times. Enter-complete I find to be even more infuriating. But auto-complete, especially in text editors designed for programmers, is often very a elaborate feature. It’s often context-sensitive, …

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How I got go-spew to work with GopherJS

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go-spew is a very handy library used for dumping arbitrarily complex data structures in a (roughly) human-readable format. This is immensely helpful when debugging or writing automated tests in programs. Coupled with a package like go-difflib, it can make comparing the expected and actual results of a test not only easy, but into something approaching …

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One thing I miss about unit tests: Unit tests as Documentation

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I wrote this post in October of 2015 as I was adjusting to life without unit tests at a new job. I recently stumbled upon it in my Drafts, and edited it down to a single point for publication. In October of last year I took a new job at a company with a large …

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How to install CouchDB 1.6.1 on Debian 8.2 (jessie)

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First, I must give credit where it is due. These instructions are based on Matteo Mattei’s earlier article Install CouchDB 1.6.x on Debian 7 (Wheezy), but with some important changes. The commands below assume you have sudo properly configured on your system, and that you are running as a standard user. If you’re doing everything …

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Docker: Up and Running — A book review

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I was recently tasked with developing a new web service application at work. This gave me a reason to investigate Docker as a possible deployment platform, so I’ve been reading about Docker. I just finished reading my second book on the topic, the not-yet-released (but it is available for Kindle) Docker: Up and Running by …

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In search of the best Go HTTP router for REST

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I’m diving into REST APIs, and I want to implement one in Go, largely as a way to teach myself more about the language. One of the first problems I came up across (within an hour of starting coding) is that the HTTP router I selected (gorilla/mux) doesn’t have any way to issue a 405 …

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How to learn REST: A resource guide

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I have a new software project in mind. I want to do it right. So I’ll use a RESTful web API. Which, of course, like any good software developer, I already understood pretty well, but I wanted to just brush up on my REST game, and make sure I got all the best practices down. …

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