“Give a person a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, feed them for a lifetime.” A classic piece of advice, but I don’t really know anything about fishing. I do however know about baking bread. (See poorly-lit pictures of my bakes on my instagram account…

What they are, why you should have them, and how to go about making your own. — Engineering Guidelines are a collection of your an organizations’ Best Practices; a distillation of the institutional knowledge around “how things should be done here”. They are a cross between a Mission Statement, Company Values, and an Employee Handbook for your engineering department. Does your company have engineering guidelines? It should.

Every time the discussion comes up around “What does good Go code look like”, the response is “check the standard library”. However, not all of the standard library is a good example. Some of it was written early on, before styles had settled down or before best practices were understood…

This is an expanded version of a presentation I gave on memory. Entire books have been written on these topics. This is just a sampler to get you familiar with the ideas and provide a groundwork for you to supplement with your own research. …

Like this article? Buy me a coffee. Here’s a problem. I have a set of keys and values. I also have some servers for a key-value store. This could be memcached, Redis, MySQL, whatever. I want to distribute the keys across the servers so I can find them again. And…

People frequently ask why Go does things a certain way, and the answer is that the decisions seem odd without context. So the next question is, what is this context and where did it come from? The most obvious is the article by Rob Pike “Language Design in the Service…

With the introduction of //go:generate, Go made it easier to integrate auto-generation tools into your build. Tools like stringer eliminate writing repetitive code by hand, while programs like yacc and ragel make it possible to generate optimized parsers. …

Fuzzing Perl/XS modules with AFL This blog post will walk through the steps required to fuzz a Perl XS module with American Fuzzy Lop, the coverage-based fuzzing tool. At Booking.com, we use Perl. A lot. Perl has a lot of upsides for us (which I won’t go into), and it…

The Go regexp package is a simplified port of the re2 regular expression engine from Google (https://github.com/google/re2). It provides linear-time matching for regular expressions. It is able to provide this guarantee because it only permits regexps that are Regular Expressions in the formal computer science sense of the term. …