Posts

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. Issue there is that it might become rather expensive if you start spinning many instances. And CI is something that you might not want to run on the same machine as your services. So I thoguht to myself maybe I can get my jenkins on ec2-nano? That would probably set me back 5$ a month. Then a cheaper option came to mind - why not use the RPI3 for my Jenkins? ...

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. I basically ended up making a random choice - I ended up in informatics. While I was decent at maths and computers, I would by no means consider myself a competent developer on my uni days. It was really hard and terrifying. Lots of maths on top of maths with only a few lectures focusing on coding. I did like coding but the constant mathematics in day to day uni life was a real killer. By the end of first semester I was highly unmotivated by the lack of coding we were doing. I was a tad lazy, so I did not have any side projects to focus on. At this point in time I started thinking about quitting but peer pressure and my own reluctance to give up came through. I struggled to the sixth semester with little to no will left in studying. I was doing OK at this point. I needed to put little effort into studies themselves to just manage to not get kicked out. I thought I’d finish the degree and definitely not touch anything related to programming. My main concern with programming was that it probably consists of lots and lots of maths that I definitely did not enjoy at that point. I found it boring therefore programming looked boring to me as well. I had no side projects and would describe my skill in programming little more than basic. I should note that by this point I was still living off my parents and had no job. Then one of my classmates who had been working as a developer for a few years offered an opportunity to try and get past an intense course in the company he was working with. I did not know if I was ready for it and certainly felt apprehension for not doing there well either. Nonetheless I gathered my courage and got to the interview. The interview did not go well especially the technical part. I probably answered less than 30% of the questions correctly. One thing I did do and am still proud of is never lied - when confronted with a question I had no clue about I stated that I had no knowledge in the area. Despite my worries, I got accepted. ...

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.nano instance and then uses wrk to benchmark it from a T2.small instance. After reading this, I thought to myself - surely .NET cannot be quicker than GO. I decided to try and make a similar effort and get a little bit of competition going between a .NET implementation with, hopefully, a representative version of Oren’s .NET server made with GO. For GO - I went with 3 candidates gin, fasthttp and iris. I also benchmark Node’s Express. All the tests were performed on the same EC2 instance, with production/release configurations, so variance should be low. I also use the same parameters for wrk as Oren. This is as close as I could get to apples to apples type of comparison. ...

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. It does have its downsides though. It does add overhead so using it everywhere might not be the best idea. ...

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. Requirements were quite simple: ...

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. All you want to achieve with inheritance can instead be done through composition and the use of interfaces. It also gets rid of generics. This means that the code you read will be clear and simple. It might be more verbose than many other languages but you also carry more control. ...

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. Being able to deploy to S3 is also a benefit - no need to manage anything - and since the webpage is going to be pretty static I’m thinking hexo is a good way to go. The problem though, is that most of the themes that hexo has are quite slow out of the box. For this walkthrough, I’ll be doing a demo repo with a standard hexo init followed by a clone of the theme edinburgh. I have a repo setup with all the steps tagged, so you should be able to see the exact changes I’m making. I’ll include step links just after the heading for each section if you’re interested in following along. Let’s get going then. ...

So me and my girlfriend have been playing with the idea of starting a blog for quite some time now. Having a day off I’ve decided to put it to good use and start creating one. Being a developer I’ve had a few concerns when it came to choosing a blog framework: I’m a control freak so I’d prefer hosting it myself. Blogging platforms are out of the question. I like markdown - the blog must support it. It must be lightweight. It must be easily deployable to s3 static website hosting. I should not need to use anything else than s3 for hosting. Just a text editor and a CLI for a good blogging experience. After a bit of research and a tip from a friend I’ve landed on Hexo.io. It seems to tick all of my boxes. Plugin support seems to be excellent as well. Being based on node it means I’ll mostly be able to find anything my heart might desire. If not - I can code it myself. ...