Follow these practices to mitigate failures and build systems that last — What is Engineering? We call ourselves “software engineers,” but I don’t know how much time we spend thinking about what engineering is. We think about engineers being people who design and build things, whether they are bridges or circuits or software. …

Go might soon include its most requested feature — About three years ago, I was working on a pull request approval manager for GitHub written in Go called Checks-Out. While building out the integration layer, I came across a situation where the straightforward approach in Go was overly repetitive. …

A deep dive into why the world depends on simple, reliable, well-understood technologies I’ve been working as a professional software engineer for nearly 23 years, and I’ve been writing programs for about 38. In that time, I’ve used a lot of languages. …

Part of being a technology company is producing reliable technology at a rapid pace. At the same time, we cannot sacrifice code quality just to deliver slightly faster. One of the primary tools for ensuring code quality while maintaining a rapid release schedule is writing tests. …

Microservices are the starting point for your technical transformation, not the end. — Setting: Europe, During The Napoleonic Wars Once upon a time, a soldier was returning from war. It was a long trip back home and on the way he came to a village. This village had been scarred by the war; everyone was huddled in their houses, unwilling to go out and help their neighbors. The soldier…

4 Comparisons Between Go and Java — One thing that non-programmers often find surprising about programming is that different languages have different communities with different cultures. These cultures dictate things both large (how people decide what new features are added to a language) and small (tabs vs. spaces). They also pop up in interesting ways. Recently, I…

A Satirical Take on Programming in Go In my last blog post, I explained how to be an evil Go programmer. Evil comes in many forms, but in programming, evil consists of intentionally making code harder to understand and maintain. Evil programs ignore language idioms in favor of techniques that provide short-term benefits in exchange for long-term…

A Satirical Take on Programming in Go — After decades of programming in Java, for the past several years I have been mostly working in Go. Now, working in Go is great, primarily because the code is so easy to follow. Java had simplified the C++ programming model by removing multiple inheritance, manual memory management, and operator overloading…

Post 6 in a Series on Go — In my last blog post, we looked at Go’s reflection package and went through some quick demonstrations of the features it enables. What wasn’t clear is when these features would be useful. Everything we did with reflection could have been implemented without it — and it would have been more…