Refactoring source code should be a constant process in software’s lifecycle. I advocate for 20-25% of time spent on developing software to be used on refactoring exclusively. After working with Gorsk in two projects running now in production (one of them being a large SaaS), I’ve found many things I don’t like about it. During the development of those projects I refactored some things, but I decided the base needs to be updated too. Read more

I’ve been dealing with RESTful services for the last three years, both professionally and for hobby projects. Since I came from SOAP/XML/Oracle background, REST felt so great and modern. Even though I felt late to the party, I think I didn’t lose that much. However, with the advancement of Cloud Native projects, I feel like I’m getting behind modern tools and technologies. And I want to change that. Read more

Recently we moved some of our hard-coded web-app configuration values into a YAML file. Arguing aside (YAML vs TOML vs …), YAML does a great job being easily readable by us - humans. By default, the yaml library marshals maps into map[string]interface{}, requiring a small change to get it marshaled into map[string]string. Read more

Twisk, an acronym for Twirp starter kit, helps you get started with a simple Golang RPC framework with protobuf service definitions - Twirp. It features everything from authorization, implemented CRUD on a single entity, logging, configuration and more. Using minimal dependencies, idiomatic code and best practices, it helps you get started with Golang backend API development - both JSON and Protobuf. Read more

I’ve previously written an Article on generating OpenAPI (Swagger) spec automatically within Golang. It’s the most popular article on this blog since lots of developers are searching for it. In it, I mentioned that in order to serve the swagger.json with SwaggerUI, a Docker instance is required that will serve SwaggerUI. There is an easier way to implement it, and this article will demonstrate how to do it with net/http, Gin and Echo. Read more

After being a Mac user for about a year, I decided to switch to GNU/Linux or to be more precise Ubuntu, for plenty of reasons. After few weeks of researching what laptop to buy, I asked for a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 5th Gen from my company. Besides writing a software review,this articles include hardware comparison between the Thinkpad and MacBookPro (ntb 2016) as well. Read more

Recently I spent a lot of time working with both Gin and Echo. Primarily I wrote an open source restful starter kit named Gorsk (GitHub/Blog post). Besides Gorsk, I’m working on two web apps utilizing Gin/Echo. Even though the reasons for (not) using Golang’s ‘Web frameworks’ are mentioned quite often, I have built my own opinion on these. Read more

A decade ago I was happy if there were comments on my blog. Ten years later, having a full-time job, family and lots of other responsibilities I have no feeling about them. I feel good helping and informing others, but I feel comments on this blog aren’t benefiting much in this area (helping others). Additionally, I prefer the cleaner look and shorter loading times of the website. Therefore, comments are no more. Read more

Until recently I never knew how simple it could be to automate a task in the browser. A client wanted me to build simple automation script for Chrome - it would log into his Drupal website, open Bootstrap settings and change cdn’s to the one found in config file. Sounded bit hard at the beginning, but after playing an hour with chromedp it became quite trivial. Example repo is available on GitHub. Read more

There are many ways to write a (RESTful) backend in Go. Most of the available tutorials are way too simple, with all the presented content fitting into a single file (or at most two-three). More complex examples are quite rare, and even most of them miss lots of things for the sake of reducing complexity. That’s one of the reasons I wrote Gorsk - to have a fully functional example of a RESTful backend (in Golang) utilizing best practices, idiomatic code, and minimal dependencies. Read more