I guess society celebrates turning 40 as a big milestone birthday. I might have some wisdom, anecdotes, and pithy quotes to share that might serve others well since I've been alive on this big ball of rock for 4 decades. Here are 40 things I've learned during my time here in no particular order: Mental and physical...

I read David Crawshaw's recent post about the same topic and I thought it would be nice to do the same. Go I've always tried to be a polyglot programmer to allow myself to learn and be a well rounded software engineer, but as time went on I realized that specializing in a small set areas is also important. I made a...

I have written a lot of HTTP clients that talk to 3rd party APIs over the years and there have been some patterns that have emerged and so I thought I would share them in hopes they help others. The major concepts I want to highlight are: Composing Client Options JSON Encoding/Decoding to Go Types HTTP Request...

I get this question a decent amount from people who don't lift and my answers usually consist of: "I spend all day staring at a computer screen and it offers a nice balance to work life behind a desk." "It facinates me what the human body is capable of doing if it is trained and taken care of so I want to see how...

Over the years I've been programming and people ask me what I do for a living, I try to explain to them as best I can. Inevitably, they respond with something along the lines of "that sounds very hard and complicated". To someone without programming skills, this sure sounds hard. To me, performing open heart surgery...

I managed to switch my site over to using Zola. It was very tempting since the template engine looked a lot simpler than Hugo. It took me about 3 hours to figure out how to map each of the Hugo features to the Zola equivalent. I've included the diff from the both versions for comparison. You can see that zola...

Update: This idea got popular enough that I decided to turn it into a tool. You can grab it from http://pprof.sh. There are a lot of great articles on the interwebs about profiling entire Go applications for CPU and memory usage, however I can never remember the syntax for doing the same thing for specific...

If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems. The Redis Protocol specification states it best by describing its own protocol, but this applies to all of the plain text protocols I will cover. Simple to...

Every since the world started shutting down when COVID-19 hit I've been finding myself reverting back to simpler things. With the constant firehose of information from the news channels, social feeds, and just general information overload I've been burning out on almost a weekly basis. It sucks and I am tired. I...

Well, my undergraduate career is finally over. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute I was fortunate enough to get accepted to my first choice back in 2000 when I graduated high school. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't without its speed bumps. I had received the Rensselaer Medal prior to receiving my acceptance letter...