Open Source Life

Take America Back from the 1%

November 5th Bank Transfer Day

More info on finding a local credit union and moving your money.

This weekend I decided to learn the basics of Go and see if there was a way that I could experiment with the language with a quick project, preferably a web app.

I started by reading up the Getting Started guide on the golang.org website and then started using A Tour of Go. About half-way into it, I felt like I had absorbed about all that I could without reading some more complex examples and experimenting.

Installing Go on my laptop was pretty simple. I did have a few issues with getting environmental variables correct to get goinstall to work.

A few google searches lead me to the projects section of the Go Dashboard. From there I started looking at the web frameworks and toolkits. I’ve got a good amount of experience with some of the more do-it-yourself web frameworks like Tornado, so I was looking for the closest thing to that as I could find. The Twister project looked pretty promising.

At this point, I decided to port the logbook project Go as a first project. I picked this one because it is a fairly simple CRUD web application that I wanted to port over to use MySQL from SQLite and integrate bootstrap into it.

This meant finding solutions to two problems: How do I engage MySQL? How should template handling be done? There were a few MySQL client libraries listed on the projects page and a few additional ones mentioned on the mailing list, but the majority were either abandoned, incomplete or unstable. I ended up using GoMySQL, although it has been updated since 5/2011. I’m really hoping that I stumble on or someone recommends a better alternative.

For templating, I saw that there was a mustache library, mustache.go, and went with that. It supports the basics that I’m looking for and I’ve had an itch to use it for a little while now. Although it hasn’t been updated since 4/2011, it seems pretty stable.

Porting the code over was pretty fun. It feels like the standard library set in Go is a bit bare and lacks some of polish that Python has, but all of the basic functionality ported over without a fuss. I had to write a string scanner to parse space/quote separated tags out of a list and deal with MySQL in an ugly way, to name a few.

With all of that said, the project is “done” and all of the functionality ported. Take a look at the gobook project on GitHub and tell me what you think. I’d love to get a quick code review from some people more skilled in Go to learn about how I could be doing some things better.

First impressions: I love it. At my current job I do about 70% Java and 30% c++, mostly building concurrent and distributed backend/platform systems. I usually work on multi-threaded apps and use several different libraries to work (or fake) async functionality: nio, akka, boost thread, libevent, zmq, etc. My last job was 100% Erlang, which has an awesome reputation for massively concurrent development.

What I love about Go is that it feels like it takes the best of what I’ve worked with and distilled it down into a pretty basic set of primitives that cover most of them. I’m not sure if I’ll get to work on Go projects much, but I’d really love to.

I saw today that new Delicious.com site is live and it is “back to beta”. I honestly can’t believe what I’m seeing here. It is far to early (in the day) to go into full on rant mode, so I’ll summarize my grievances.

Popular topic links are no longer the first thing you see when you visit the site. Nor are recent popular tags.

Where THE FUCK did my RSS feeds go?

They’ve introduced an additional layer of organization called “stacks” which is absurd. Delicious uses (read as: pioneered) tags because of their simplicity and efficiency at organizing thought. Stacks feel awkward to try to integrate into the existing collection organization model.

The nav bar has been rewritten and the basic links to my bookmarks, settings, etc are no longer clearly visible without mouse-over effects.

Looks like my friend list and networks are gone.

No quick link or indicator that someone has bookmarked something for me. That one is a real bummer.

The edit link dialog no longer shows the full URLof what has been saved. It also looks like they’ve tried cramming stacks into it as well.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m extremely disappointed. Granted, I used to work on Delicious at Yahoo a few years ago. I’m no Josh(ua) or Les, but I really loved that site because of its simplicity, efficiency and usefulness. When Yahoo announced (leaked) that Delicious was going to be shutdown, I switched over to Pinboard and until Delicious can get its act together, that is where I’ll be.