Do you use docker-compose to run your local development environment? Do you write your commands into a Makefile to protect your brain and your fingers from complex startup scripts? If so, then you know how painful it is to tell your service to wait for the database before starting. In a sane production environment, a service should always boot and patiently wait for the dependencies to become available, and signal their state through something like a readiness probe. Read more

IAM stands for Identity and Access Management. It is the service that lets you manage authentication and authorization within your AWS account. Authentication and Authorisation in AWS are based on six building blocks1: Account, User, Group, Policy, Action and Role. Everything I write here, and much more, can be found in the AWS documentation. This post is nothing more than a quick introduction to get you started with the basics. Read more

At work, I keep a todo list vaguely resembling a bullet-journal. +--------------+ | * Task | | x Completed | | > Migrated | | - Cancelled | +--------------+ ## 2019-05-27 x Version-pin deploy tooling x Build auth package * Replace Marco's deploy keys in the CI ## 2019-05-28 x Replace Marco's deploy keys in the CI * Write new ticket: failed logins on STG * Write new ticket: Create users for Kubectl * Investigate bug #123 ## 2019-05-29 x Write new ticket: Create users for Kubectl > Write new ticket: failed logins on STG Every working day, I open the file with my favourite editor, I add the date, and I report the unfinished items that I intend to work on. Read more

I was happily playing with my shiny new prime-number-checker, trying out how loops work in C++. When I started entering stupidly big numbers, something strange happened. ./main Enter a number: 5784320578432578493207508493 Congratulations, it's prime! Except, that is not actually a prime number. I can’t have typed a prime number by randomly banging on the keypad. What’s going on? I didn’t code any input sanitization in my prime-number-checker, so let’s check what my program actually gets. Read more

My first steps: I have enrolled for a Pluralsight course I have installed a C++ syntax extension on my beloved editor. Discovery #1: Classes feel like language extensions In Go, primitive types are special. Some properties only apply to them; for example, there is no way of defining a behaviour for make(myType). Every primitive type brings its own built-in constructor, and custom types inherit the constructor from the primitive type they’re based on. Read more

A long time ago, I started programming with Python. Everything was great and I was happy. Then I discovered Go. Everything was fast and portable and powerful. This is my first day into learning C++. Why? A SQL metaphor I used to be contributor to an opensource Go database adaptor: something like an object-relational mapper. Back then, I was fascinated by the idea of abstracting away SQL from my applications. Read more

Browsers let us save passwords and to retrieve them. This way, we can use strings too long and complex to be remembered. Some browsers, with or without the support of external password managers, generate new passwords for us and manage them seamlessly. However most of the time, everything regarding passwords is still based on the ability of the browser of guessing which input field contains a username, and which one contains a password. Read more

Build with Modules, Ship from Scratch If you use dep, check out this post instead. Goals: The application executable is compiled inside a container, in order to boost reproducibility The resulting image must be as small as possible The application must run in a container as secure as possible: an unprivileged user in a minimal environment The application must be able to make HTTPS calls It is a multistage Dockerfile: the first throwaway stage is used for building, while the final image will only contain the compiled binary executable. Read more

In this video, Robert Martin uses Kotlin and JUnit to illustrate his Three Laws of TDD. But what about Go? Follow me and challenge the master! We will walk in his footsteps with the only help of Brad Fitzpatrick’s checkFunc pattern. The Three Laws You are not allowed to write any production code unless it is to make a failing unit test pass. You are not allowed to write any more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail; and compilation failures are failures. Read more

Build With Dep, Ship From Scratch For Go 1.11 modules, check this post instead. In a devops environment, pushing some code to the repository is not enough. You have to ship it. And the first step is often writing a Dockerfile. The goals: The code has to be compiled in a container, to boost the chances my build will be reproducible. Use dep for fetching the dependencies in case the vendor folder is not committed alongside with the code. Read more