In (domain or enterprise software) architecture, there are to generic patterns you’ll likely come across often, yet many developers does not seem to be familiar with them and knowing a bit about them may help understand why some choices are made when building a complete software stack across a company or enterprise.

These are:

• Best of suite
• Best of Breed.

When adopting the “best of suite” strategy, the Enterprise Architecture will seek to find big software suites, which can over a large domains. One of the most often picked suites is often Microsoft OFfice, where Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the other applications included in Microsoft office comes a single package - a suite.

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.
• Imposing a self-imposed rule of “not imports” (beyond standard library) makes it harder to solve, but I learn more.

I’ve uploaded most of the solutions to Github, but still needed to clean and rewrite the code from the last days before they are “shareable” :-)

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.

I realize that Google Photos, Flickr and multiple other solutions may work for such an occation, but we really didn’t want to share the photos outside the company and nor force anyone to create an account anywhere - neither to see the photos nor to contribute with their own.

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. Some seem to have pride in having a green carpet showing long periods of continuous activity.