Software Engineering

Looping thorugh the Alphabet in GoLang

In a recent Go programming task I needed to loop through the letters from a to z. I also needed the capital letter from A to Z. For-looping thorugh the letters in Go is luckily a breeze. The easiest way is just using a Rune. A Rune is an int32 which represent a unicode character. As a rune (the variable r below) is a Unicode character, it allows me to use the ToUpper() from the unicode package to find the Uppercase version of the letter.

Github activity fail

Github is quite a fantastic service for source code management and hosts a suite of wonderful tools which can help you manage the development, tracking issues and much more. One of the fun things is the github activity dashboard located on your personal frontpage which shows how much you’ve done. I’m sure it’s mostly a fun thing and it allows you to sort of get an idea of it the account is dead or alive.

Have your IT systems joined Social Media?

No, your servers should (probably) not have a facebook profile, nor should your servicebus have a twitter profile, but as the work tools change and evolve, you should probably consider updating the stream of status mails to more modern “social media” used at work. When you’re in DevOps you probably get a steady stream of emails from various systems checking in. It may be alert emails, health checks or backup completed emails.

No more pets in IT

Remember the good old days, when IT got a new server. It was a special event - and naturally the naming game. Finding that special name for the server, which neatly fitted into the naming scheme adopted (be it Indian cities, Nordic mythology or cartoon characters). This ought to be then, but the ceremony still happens regularly in many IT departments, where servers are treated with the same affection as with pets - and with all the bad side effects it may bring along.

Why DevOps works...

I’m digging through a backlog of podcasts and the gem of the day goes to SE-Radio podcast. In episode #247 they talk about DevOps and while I’ve preached and practiced DevOps for years, as mainly as common sense, the podcast did present a more reasonable argument why it works. Developers are praised and appreciated for short time to market; the number of new features they introduce and changes they make to the running system.