https://timboring.com/blog/ Recent content in Blogs on Tim Boring Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Copyright ©2020 Tim Boring. All rights reserved. Wed, 03 Feb 2021 18:11:54 -0500 https://timboring.com/blog/writing-a-book/ Wed, 03 Feb 2021 18:11:54 -0500 https://timboring.com/blog/writing-a-book/ A couple of weeks ago I signed a contract to write a book for Manning Publications. I’m excited and anxious, to say the least. The book is about orchestration systems, like Google’s Borg or Kubernetes or Nomad. Except, instead of a dry book about the theory of orchestration and scheduling and how such things are implemented in existing orchestrators, it’s a practical book that walks the reader through the implementation of an orchestrator, from scratch. https://timboring.com/blog/homecoming/ Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:09:06 -0500 https://timboring.com/blog/homecoming/ I was a Vim user for 15 years until the shine of newer editors caught my eye. Since 2016, I’ve been exploring the wilderness: Sublime, Atom, Spacemacs, PyCharm, VSCode, and Spacevim. In 2016, I started experimenting in response to my new co-workers. I spent the previous nine years working in an environment where many engineers used either Emacs or Vim. Upon leaving that environment, I found myself in a strange new world. https://timboring.com/blog/review-concurrency-in-go-part2/ Mon, 16 Nov 2020 20:27:50 -0400 https://timboring.com/blog/review-concurrency-in-go-part2/ This post is the follow up to Review: Concurrency in Go: Chapters 1-3. Chapter 4 This chapter is the meat of the book. Cox-Buday devotes sixty pages to covering concurrency patterns–almost a third of the book’s total pages. The chapter starts with a discussion of confinement: “the simple yet powerful idea of ensuring information is only ever available from one concurrent process.” She identifies two types of confinement: lexical and ad-hoc. https://timboring.com/blog/pointers-in-go/ Sun, 08 Nov 2020 20:37:46 -0500 https://timboring.com/blog/pointers-in-go/ This post is mostly targeting an audience of one: myself. It’s an attempt to write down what I’ve learned about pointers in Go since diving back into the language three months ago. I wrote a little bit of C and C++ way back in the early 2000s. So, I have been exposed to pointers before–pretty sure I used them in a CS 101 class to try to impress my professor. That said, I’m willing to bet a paycheck my past self was using them without understanding much about them. https://timboring.com/blog/testing-as-confidence-booster/ Sun, 18 Oct 2020 21:53:59 -0400 https://timboring.com/blog/testing-as-confidence-booster/ “We’ll get the interns to write our tests later.” That quote was from a manager explaining his team’s testing strategy during a product udpate. No one else in the room or on the call blinked. I was shocked. I had a feeling that my company wasn’t great at testing. It was obvious from the number of outages across our products at any given time that testing wasn’t a priority. To hear a manager, however, publicly say that the team’s current engineers, the ones who were writing code that was being deployed into production, would not be the ones writing tests–I mean, major WTF? https://timboring.com/blog/review-concurrency-in-go/ Sun, 18 Oct 2020 14:11:35 -0400 https://timboring.com/blog/review-concurrency-in-go/ I’ve recently started writing more Go code, and naturally one of the first things I encountered were goroutines and channels. The official tutorial introduces the concepts, but in many ways isn’t much more than a range of “Hello World” examples. Searching Amazon for “golang concurrency”, I came acrosss Katherine Cox-Buday’s Concurrency in Go: Tools and Techniques for Developers. It’s a slim volume, weighing in at 223 pages, and contains six chapters: https://timboring.com/blog/what-is-a-scheduler/ Sun, 27 Sep 2020 16:39:25 -0400 https://timboring.com/blog/what-is-a-scheduler/ Do a search for “kubernetes” on Google and you get back 31 million results. Do a search for “nomad scheduler” and you get back 200,000 results. Despite all the hype around Kubernetes, I often wonder if folks stop and think about what Kubernetes is at heart? And same goes for HashiCorp’s Nomad. If you peel away all the layers and the hype, the core problem that Kubernetes and Nomad solve is this: automatically scheduling jobs onto a pool of machines. https://timboring.com/blog/uses-of-testing/ Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:02:04 -0400 https://timboring.com/blog/uses-of-testing/ I’ve been (re)learning Go recently. It has been more than six years since I did anything close to professional coding using Go. Things have changed a bit in the interim. During this process, I’ve noticed an interesting behavior. While I am reading docs, I’m just as frequently reading source code–and mostly test code. For the last 10+ years, I’ve worked primarily in Python. During that time, I relied heavily on the Requests library for making HTTP requests and doing “stuff” with the responses.