Git is often refered to as a source control tool. It’s useful both for teams working on a shared source code as well as individuals how wants a log of the changes in their sourcecode over time. While sourcecode handling is the most common use case, Git itself isn’t per say limited to just managing sourcecode and using Git repositories for non-sourcecode may also have value in your daily work. This post is a small apetizer of some of the cases I’ve been using Git for non-sourcecode.

When storing data, most data have a lifecycle - it created, managed and eventually deleted through operation of the application or script that use it. There are however to kinds of data storage which is slightly different, which developers should know about as they may be nice patterns to know and use when applicable.

Emphemeral data

The first data storage is emphemeral data. This kind of data will eventually automatically be deleted. In most cases the data is stored shortly - an hour, a day or a week - but there isn’t any fixed rule which define when the data disappear - just that it does by itself without any explicit cleanup or pruning from the developer (or user).

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.