I’ve once again had fun with Advent of code. I’m still using it as a motivation to learn and be better at programming Go(lang). Here are some observations from the challenge rund this year: The hardest challenges was more often in understanding the task and make sure all rules was understood correctly. Despite Go (1.17) being a small language, it has all needed to solve any of the challenges. While I may not write Idiomatic Go - I do write readable code - even for people who don’t know Golang.

I’m not usually playing too much around on Windows apart from using office and teams - and other software bound to windows which company work require. A small event on an ongoing project however did require some small exploration into Windows and what could be done to solve a simple task. We had an all-day event, where multiple photos were taken on mobile phones througout the day. I needed to collect the photos, sort them and share them.

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 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.

I’m using Let’s Encrypt as Certificate Authority on this and many other sites. I like it, as it allows me to automate certificate creation and renewals, however I also have some monitoring making sure everything works as expected. I recently got a few alerts as some certificates weren’t renewed as expected. I figured nothing had changed on the server setup and there was renewal happening for a few days, I started looking into it and found the issue why the renewal was failing, so here’s the story.