I made my own commenting server. Here's why.

I haven’t been blogging much lately. That’s due to the fact that most of my spare time went to creating mouthful - a commenting server that I’ve since switched this blog to. Before that I was using isso. Here’s why I did it. The issue with isso While I really like isso, there’s one problem that kills it for me. Under no load, the backend consumes nearly 50MB of memory on my server....

April 19, 2018 · Vik

Why I hate OpenApi(swagger)

<rant> I absolutely despise OpenApi(well, swagger. I’ll call it swagger since it was that for most of my career). It’s supposed to make the process of creating and documenting an API easier. But does it really?… Here’s what I think about it. Writing the swagger schema is so damn tedious From my experience when someone mentions swagger, you’ll get dragged into design first - code later mindset rather quickly. While it sounds good on paper the practical implications of writing a swagger schema just make me want to curl in a ball in the corner of the office....

February 24, 2018 · Vik

IDE for GO

There are quite a few IDE choices for Go. I’m not going to list them all, but here are my prefered ones with the reasoning behind it. The free option VS code is my main IDE as of late. It does not matter if I code Go or Node, I always prefer to go with VS code. I used to use Atom for it’s extensibility and the amount of packages avaialble....

February 13, 2018 · Vik

Jenkins on raspberry pi 3

So I’ve had this raspberry pi 3 laying around in my closet for a year or a bit more now. While I thought I’d use it for automating something such as monitoring our plants for changes in soil moisture that did not come to fruition. With the start of this blog and the increase in tooling around it, I really needed something to run any sort of CI platform. I tend to host everything under AWS so that everything is under one roof....

February 9, 2018 · Vik

How I started my professional career

I will occasionally come across a post like this on Reddit or other social platforms. This post is an attempt to encourage people to try and get their careers in IT started. This is how it all started for me… Initial apprehension of programming After finishing high school, I ended up studying informatics at Vilnius University. The choice was not easy, I was drifting heavily towards economics and physics, as well as considering the more humanitarian part of with focus on business and business management....

January 27, 2018 · Vik

Kestrel vs Gin vs Iris vs Express vs Fasthttp on EC2 nano

Since this post got quite a bit of traction, I decided to update it by rerunning all the benchmarks as well as adding GO’s fasthttp and Node’s express to the comparison. I came across this blog post on ayende.com. Here Oren Eini tries to see how far he could push a simple ipify style of api on an EC2 by running a synthetic benchmark. He hosts the http server on a T2....

January 23, 2018 · Vik

Go's defer statement

Defer is the golang’s version of the more familliar finally statement of the try/catch block in languages like Java and C#. The defer allows you to perform actions when surrounding function returns or panics. Unlike finally blocks though it does not need to be placed at the bottom of the code block. You can also have multiple defer statements in a single function body. This allows for handy clean up of resources....

January 19, 2018 · Vik

Self-hosted disqus alternative for 5$ a month

I was looking for a way to add commenting functionality to the blog. The obvious candidate was Disqus but I did not choose it for 2 reasons: It’s too heavy(at around 200KB) It contains ads The weight itself would kill my quest for page speed instantly.So I set up to find a way to provide commenting ability on the blog. I knew this would probably lead me to a self-hosted solution but that did not scare me....

January 12, 2018 · Vik

Why I like go

I’ve been using Go as my main programming language at work for the last 6 months. Here’s why I absolutely adore the language. It’s simple Go is remarkably simple. It’s an object oriented programming language but instead of the more typical classes you find in C# or Java it only has structs. Structs cannot inherit, meaning you can’t end up in inheritance hell. I won’t go into detail why inheritance is bad, but if you want an explanation Inheritance is Inherently Evil is a good read on that....

January 6, 2018 · Vik

Speeding hexo (or any page) for PageSpeed insights

An explanation As mentioned in my previous post, I really wanted to optimize my hexo blog for speed. I’ve started a new project and decided hexo would be a good fit for it. Since I’ve grown used to hexo, it will make development faster. Albeit it’s not a blog I’m working on, but a webpage for a local blacksmith. That will involve quite a few images and just a few text entries/pages....

January 4, 2018 · Vik