Chunnel Me More Train Time

I want to travel by train more. It’s not standard in the US.

Room for my legs, minimal lines & boarding drama.

They just take off without having everyone put their seats in the upright position.

Welcome

The first few minutes had a wonderful English lady great the children (fellow traveler) and made the kids feel welcome.

Walk down the street, enter a restaurant that had the name “Coffee” in it that turns out to be a pub.

Noisy with a …

Ollama makes this really easy. I’ve tried a few options to have local code generation tooling available, and this took the cake for wrapping up localized model running.

I’ve got 64gb of ram on my M2 Max Macbook, so I can just run ollama run llama2:13b and get a local model up and ready to use.

If you are like most of humanity and want less resources taken up, try just ollama run llama2.

Connect this to Continue and you’ve got a local coding assistant. It’s click and go to …

Exploring Mont Saint-Michel

We set off in the car to explore Saint Mont Michel. After a beautiful cruise in the rental at 130kph, we arrived. The parking lot was huge, reminding me of a smaller version of a Six Flag Over Texas. A single bus picked us up and took us to the site. This bus is one of maybe 2 actively in rotation, with a max capacity of 68.

I can’t even imagine how insane this journey would have been during peak season. There’s no way I’d recommend it during a …

Greeting The Shop Keeper

Also feels like this isn’t true. While it may be a bit more than the US, which I’d normally greet a small shop owner if we made eye contact, it’s also the same here. Being pleasant goes a long way.

Haven’t seen any case personally where a look was given because of a lack of a greeting, mostly people are busy doing their work and don’t pay you attention.

Style

From online material, I had the impression that French folks dressed …

A Trip to the Bakery

Today, I took Karis out for a bit of spontaneity. We decided to go down to Copains, a bakery about 30 minutes away, taking the D train followed by Metro 2. As we walked up the idyllic streets, wet with Paris rain, Copains stood out, bright and cheerful in contrast to the surrounding shops. Its layout was beautiful, reminding me of a minimalist, modern style with plenty of space that could have been used for café tables, but was instead just empty. A mosaic-style ceiling …

Most of the basic foods lack the same preservatives, food dye, and corn syrup that we commonly have in non-speciality foods in Europe. Lays potato chips at the local market are “natural” and contain far less salt and really taste great.

Lower your expectations with spice though. Last salsa I tried was tomato paste. I asked for the Thai medium spice and it’s like a desert.

They seriously must not like their taste buds to tingle like us Texans.

I’m going through taco …

Here’s a bit from the first week. We were pretty exhausted from jet lag so I’ve delayed posting, but figured better something now than to keep on delaying. Enjoy!

Kids Entries

Karis’ Entry: We went to a bakery the first full day here in Paris, France. After the bakery, we enjoyed our food at a park. I had a delicious glazed croissant chocolate. Then, as if on cue, a double rainbow appeared. It was amazing - the new double rainbow people! At a bus stop, I caught my first …

Got sucked into reading about ventilation systems in Europe. There’s mechanical and passive based ventilation. I’ve lived most of my adult life where central air systems are used, that it took me a day before I registered the oddity of:

• no ceiling vents
• the constant whoosh of air in the bathroom¹
• the seeming airflow from about the full length doors.

While I’m betting this would be a subpar experience in summer compared to what we have in Texas, during less heat induced times …

Somtimes you feel that you’ve done things right as a parent, even when things go awry. There we were at the park, kids needing a restroom break. Inside, I find no toilet paper, everything broken down, a poor public restroom experience.

Coming out, I see my family on the steps of this Parisian public edifice. I comment on the bathroom’s state.

Now that I’ve left New York, here’s what I had started capturing.

Ella: She’s too tired right now to narrate, but there’s a few funny highlights from her day. One of the challenges I gave the kids was to find the first official New York City rat. Ella scored the first point and was very proud of that. She also spent much of the day chasing pigeons and generally being a rascal. Of all the things she noticed, it was stuff like a pair of tennis shoes hanging from a cable …

Language defaults seem to be an interesting mix when it comes to websites. The results that show up for a different search region can also be different based on Google’s docs Search Region

One video streaming site refused to show me subtitles in English without me using a VPN to appear as a US member. My quick search through some posts on reddit and the like show this can be a really inconsistent mess depending on the site.

I bought my car, a 2010 Mazdaspeed3, without knowing how to drive a manual tranmission. Thanks to my buddy Jake driving it home, we brought it back. I got a late night crash course in a parking lot, and this saw me through the first month.¹

I might have killed the engine a few times².

So this last week, I drove another stick for the first time. Despite all this time, I realized I’d only driven my Mazdaspeed3. It’s a very touchy and tight sports clutch.

I had to dry a 1998 Ford F150 …

This bugged me for a while, as it random notifications were intrusive in when I was working.

Remove the marking notications by going to Alexa app, settings, notifications, and then turn off any categories you don’t want to be annoyed with.

I’m sitting here singing: “I’ve got brain noodles in my noggin” and I’m not sure if that’s normal.

  read more

Been playing with opencommit and wanted to assess how much using it on every single commit I still could track locally might cost me.

This script loops through all the ${HOME}/git directories and totals the commits made in last month.

Looks like using OpenAI’s api would cost me about $4-$5 if I’d used on every single commit and the size of the commits was smaller.

Not as bad as I’d thought it would be.

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After using this for a while, I figured I’d add this to my my “cool-tools” list.

Creating a new chrome alias so my typo doesn’t keep annoying me. I’m lucky enough to have access to O’Reilly Books through $work.

Problem is everytime I google it I keep letting my autocomplete show me O’Reilly Auto. 😄

Split my blog into notes.sheldonhull.com for evergreen note taking and reference content. I’ll still maintain this blog for posts.

Mkdocs allows a minimal friction to publishing and previewing. The directory structure is built automatically from directories.

While I love Hugo, it’s more work to maintain small reference pages so I’m going to split up my notes more like a “digital garden” approach.

• Free hosting through GitHub.
• 60 seconds from push to page refresh. …

That’s how children reward you for having them. They are such a responsibility and such a miracle at the same time, that the miracle of the relationship you can have with them amply repays you for the responsibility, if you can only see it. But then you have to go into the depths and take that relationship as a sacred reality and ethical requirement. And you deal with those things casually at your great peril. - Jordan Peterson¹

This was a beautiful quote that I had to capture from …

• Take the car into shop to get state inspection that’s overdue, since I don’t drive it much.
• Find out a check engine light fails the test.
• Drive towards grocery store near house, and hit a long line of traffic.
• Decide to be a dilligent budgeter and pick up milk instead of buying coffee.
• Train decides to park at road I have to cross.
• Go to gas station, grab milk.
• Arrive home.
• Make coffee.

Sometimes working from an office has it’s advantages, especially those fancy places with …

Conventional Commit

• Is it needed… No.
• Is it the only way… No.
• Is consistency better than inconsistentcy, mostly yes.

I’ve used conventional commit most of my career and it’s a fine basic standard, even if sometimes it feels strange as you get used to it. I think it’s far better than inconsistency and is common enough with tooling you can do some nice release, changelog, and versioning with it.

However, getting folks used to it can be tricky. I’m a big …

What Pulumi Is

• Pulumi is like a muscle car. Great if you want full control, power, and flexibility.
• Pulumi is fast.
• Has actual loops. Sorry HCL… Your loops are just confusing.¹

What Pulumi Is Not

• Pulumi is like a rally car. You will be traveling a gravel road that might result in a few bumps and potholes. It can handle it. However, there are things (just like HCL had/has over time) you’ll run into that don’t make sense or are bugs, but since it’s younger there …

Logical Names

Pulumi requires unique logical names (URN) for tracking the state of resources. I ran into an issue with this once I expanded to a multi-cluster deployment since Pulumi began erroring on the logical name not being unique. Let’s say you are defining a service:

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_, err = corev1.NewService(
		ctx,
		"myservice", // 👈👈👈👈 this is the logical name
        &corev1.ServiceArgs{
            ApiVersion: pulumi.String("v1"), …

If you need to work through some issues with a deployment and remove a pending operation in Pulumi state file, you can do this pretty easily manually, or save a quick bit of scrolling and use gojq (or jq if you want).

• Export: pulumi stack export --file state.json
• Align formatting: cat state.json | gojq > stateFormatted.json
• Remove pending operation: cat stateFormatted.json | gojq '.deployment.pending_operations = []' > stateNew.json
• Now you can compare the results without any whitespace …

Chicken or The Egg

Secrets with infrastructure are a problem.

• I want to source control my secrets, and deploy via CD.
• I want to use infrastructure-as-code to define my configuration, including secrets.

But I don’t want to expose the values at any stage during this. I want to keep them in a secret store, and only expose them when I need them, but I still want to manage them via code.

For a while I’ve done a blend of loading local environment variables or creating manually in a …

Night Owl for Slack

Open Slack preferences, sidebar, and paste this to get your Night Owl theme going:

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#011627,#1D3B53,#1D3B53,#82AAFF,#1D3B53,#D6DEEB,#ADDB67,#7E57C2,#0A151F,#D6DEEB

Thanks to night-owl-slack for providing the colors!

An alternative to using jsonpath with kubectl is go templates!

Try switching this:

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kubectl get serviceaccount myserviceaccount --context supercoolcontext --namespace themagicalcloud -o jsonpath='{.secrets[0].name}'
```

To this and it should work just the same.
Since I know go templates pretty well, this is a good alternative for jsonpath syntax.

````shell
kubectl get serviceaccount myserviceaccount --context supercoolcontext --namespace …

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go install github.com/cespare/reflex@latest

Then you can run a command like:

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reflex -r 'nginx.conf' -- curl -v -L http://127.0.0.1:8080 2>&1 | grep -i "^< location:\|HTTP/1.1"

You should see triggered output from the command whenever the file is saved.

Nice work @cespare. Found this pretty useful to speed up testing cycles with some cli tools.

Follow: Caleb and twitter for more cool Go magic.

Acted like I wasn’t going to go to work today with my 4 year old daughter. She looked over at me and told me I don’t have to go somewhere, I just walk up the stairs. “Your boss will want you to go to work today”. Very astitute, I observed.

But what do I do when I go to work? Do I fix cars, construction, or other things?

She looked at at me and said I put on my headset and talk to people about important stuff.

No cool computer hacker cred for me today.

This is not a comprehensive article, but more a log of the issues and wins as I work through Pulumi adoption.

tl;dr

• Pulumi is pretty powerful.
• Once you get beyond the basics, it requires a lot of effort since the tooling doesn’t have as many examples as I’d hope. This is especially true for Kubernetes. It’s a lot easier to get moving on other providers.
• It’s more intensive of a pilot to do complex things IMO than Terraform, because you aren’t getting pre-built …

Turns out helm is pretty intuitive if you already have been working with something like Hugo, which is Go template driven.

Was able to convert an entire K8 stack to helm with a couple hours of work and render everything.

I have this problem of trying to avoid percieved complex tools in an attempt to reduce “another tool” syndrome for others I work with. Sometimes, it’s important to keep in mind who is editing and doing the majority of the work, and not worry as much about the …

Finished!

Done! I’ve pretty much done above and beyond 100 days, but finding the blogging format to take a lot more effort to keep up when I’m doing a mix of puzzles, courses, and work.

Since my full-time job has Go development as a part of it now, I’ve exceeded this and going to track any future training goals in a lower overhead way, such as GitHub issues or such.

Was It Worth It?

Yes, it was worth it. It helped me break down a large amount of learning back into a …

I went through the Sourcegraph directions, but had a few challenges due to the majority of code being behind SSH access with Azure DevOps.

Finally figured out how to do this, with multiple repos in one command and no need to embed a token using https.

Navigate to: manage-repos and use this.¹ Better yet, use Loading configuration via the file system (declarative config) - Sourcegraph docs and persist locally in case you want to upgrade or rebuild the container.

{
  "url": …

I’ve used a few approaches in the past with “wait-for-it” style containers.

Realized there’s some great features with healthchecks in Docker compose so I decided to try it out and it worked perfectly for Docker compose setup.

This can be a great way to add some container health checks in Docker Compose files, or directly in the Dockerfile itself.

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progress

🎉Finished Ultimate Syntax course.

Worked on Enumerators concept using iota.

I still find this very confusing in general.

Here’s the gist I created.

progress

Ultimate Syntax (Ardan Labs - Bill Kennedy) and went back through various topics such as:

• Pointers: One thing mentioned that resonated with me was the confusion regarding pointers in parameter declarations. I also find the usage strange that the deference operator is used to denote a pointer value being dereferences in the parameter. I’d expect a pointer value to pass clearly with func (mypointer &int) and not func (mypointer int) with a pointer call.
• Literal Structs: …

I lost roughly half a day in productivity. CPU hit 100% for an extended period, making it difficult to even use the terminal.

Initially, I thought the culprit was Docker, as it was running some activity with local codespaces and linting tools. Killing Docker did nothing.

Htop pointed out kernel as the primary hog, and you can’t kill that.

After digging around online, I found further mentions about charging on the right side, not the left to avoid thermal issues causing CPU throttling.

The …

progress

Revisited Ultimate Syntax (Ardan Labs - Bill Kennedy) and went back through various topics such as:

• Variables: When to use var vs walrus operator for readability and zero value initialization.
• Type Conversions: How identical named types aren’t the same in Go’s eyes when named.
• Pointers: General overview. Mostly stuff I knew, but good basic overview again.

progress

• A few small things like Binary search.
• More listening on hexagonal architecture design.

progress

• Simple string parsing, using replaceall, regexp, and more
• Listened to a talk on Hexagonal Architecture, which really helped answer some package questions I’d unclear on.

links

• Exercism - Tech Palace

This is a continuation of my evaluation using Goland.

I tend to be a VSCode user primarily, but am working on adopting Goland incrementally to leverage some of it’s features that work a bit more consistently (like refactoring).

Losing keyboard shortcuts is painful.

VSCode lets you assign keyboard shortcuts in command pallette by clicking on the gear icon in the command you hover over. For a while I couldn’t find this in Goland. I see now I can assign any action defined from the quick …

progress

Built a Mage task to handle creation of Azure DevOps pull requests. Since the tooling out there is primarily around Github, this was useful to help standardize PR creation with autocomplete, conventional commit naming, and other properties that typically require manual changes. I found a great little TUI components library that simplified using Bubbletea components: Promptkit.

In addition, noticed some new linting help from golangci-lint for varnamelen.

This was useful as it …

progress

Felt like revisiting Exercism since the great updates and wanting a break from the more deep concept dives on mechnical sympathy and optimization in the Ultimate Go course (which is stellar).

Completed the following to continue on syllabus. It’s taking me back to basics, but stuff I can knock out pretty quick.

• Weather Forcast code commenting concepts.
• Cars Assemble covering basic if statements… yawn. Used switch statement for kicks
• Annalyn’s Infiltration boolean …

progress

Ultimate Go: 2.3.4 - Pointers-Part 4 (Stack Growth)

Scenario:

• 2k stack for each goroutine.
• 50,000 goroutines.
• Eventually, you’ll want to make the function call and you’ll want to grow the stack if the current stack limit is hit.
• We’ll want to use contigous stacks.
• The new stack will be a new contigous allocated block of memory.
• The stack growth requires all the prior values to be moved over to the new doubled stack.

A goroutine can only share values from the …

progress

More Fun With Golangci-lint

Been doing a ton the last month with golangci-lint tooling. I think this has been one of the most educational tools for learning Go I’ve come across. It has forced me to evaluate why issues are flagged, if they are opinionated preferences or best practices.

For example, wsl ensures that statements are not cuddled. This follows Dave Cheney’s writing about having an empty line seperate phrases of thought.

It’s a bit annoying to …

progress

Lots of more technical detail on Memory & Data Semantics Section.

I value this as my background in databases means that things like Stack/Heap weren’t part of my education as much. This has been useful as there are new concepts, paradigms, and ways of thinking and it’s providing a lot more foundational concepts for me to better understanding the system and compiler behavior in Go.

Ultimate Go: Pointers-Part-3: Escape Analysis

Notes

• Stacks are self-cleaning …

progress

• Ultimate Go: Pointers Part 2 (Sharing Data)

progress

• Worked with DynamoDB schema (NoSQL Document database).
• Invoked local lambda function using Docker and also remove invocation with serverless invoke. This took a bit of work to figure out as the parameters weren’t quite clear. Upon using --path for the json template I got from AWS Lambda console, I was able to to get to invoke, and stream the logs with --log.
• More mage magic with promptui and other features, so I can now test a full tear down, build, publish, and invoke a test …

progress

• I’m more on day 90+ but haven’t made the time to log it.

• Been working a ton with Mage and have some really cool work I’ll be writing up soon, including using for health checks on projects, setup of core tooling, encoding credentials, and more. 💯

• Also been working heavily on Go mono-repo module structure and some serverless based architecture tests that will make a fun write-up. I’m thinking of a demo of “Disappointment as a Service” with a …

progress

• Learned more on “mechanical sympathy” related to Go and memory management.
• How the Go compiler works related to frames with memory allocation.
• Built Mage tasks for licensing and validating problematic licenses aren’t included in a project.

links

• refactor(tooling): add verbose handling to RunTool · sheldonhull/magetools@40e7d21 · GitHub
• feat(licensing): ✨ add licensing checks using go-license · sheldonhull/magetools@82964d5 · GitHub
• refactor(gotools): 📝 add …

progress

• Learn Go With Tests -> Using select with channels to wait for multiple goroutines.
• Of particular interest is this:

Notice how we have to use make when creating a channel; rather than say var ch chan struct{}. When you use var the variable will be initialised with the “zero” value of the type. So for string it is “”, int it is 0, etc. For channels the zero value is nil and if you try and send to it with <- it will block forever because you cannot send …

progress

• Concurrency section wrap-up with Learn Go With Tests.
• Reviewed material learned from: Go R1 Day 61
• Read material, but didn’t do a lot of tests on this, per mostly concept oriented. Used concurrent progressbar example from uiprogress project to test concurrent UI updates.
• My last concurrency test case was to launch many concurrent processes for a load test. This didn’t leverage goroutinues as typically used, since it was calling to an executable on the host machine. …

progress

• Read on functional options in Go. I’ve seen this used with Pterm, Zerolog, and other tools, but didn’t know this pattern had a name.
• WalkDir is a newer function available in Go 1.16. It’s recommended for future work, but found very few examples. Adjusted my line break code to use WalkDir.

links

• Example of WalkDir I found useful
• Go-Semantic-Linebreaks
• Functional Options Pattern

progress

• Did exercism.io for gigasecond puzzle.

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package gigasecond

// import path for the time package from the standard library
import (
	"time"
)

// gigasecond represents a very very very small portion of a second.
const gigasecond = 1000000000

// AddGigasecond adds a very very very small portion of a second called a gigasecond to a provided time input.
func AddGigasecond(t time.Time) time.Time {
	gcDuration := gigasecond * …

progress

Built functionality in my blog repo to create a new 100DaysOfCode post using Mage. This provides an interactive prompt that automatically tracks the days left and increments the counter as this progresses.

• ingest toml configuration
• unmarshal to struct
• update struct
• marshal and write back to the toml configuration file
• replace matched tokens in file

progress

This wasn’t specific to Go, but was the first step towards using Go in a distributed test.

Dapr

I had an interesting project today with my first development level effort using Kubernetes. Here’s my log of attempting to use Getting started with Dapr | Dapr Docs and getting two Go APIs to talk to each other with it.

First, what is Dapr?

Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications …

progress

• Built mage tasks for go formatting and linting.

Using this approach, you can now drop a magefile.go file into a project and set the following:

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// +build mage

package main

import (

	"github.com/magefile/mage/mg"
	"github.com/pterm/pterm"

	// mage:import
	"github.com/sheldonhull/magetools/gotools"
)

Calling this can be done directly now as part of a startup task.

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// Init runs …