Posts

Successfully Writing an App and Going Beta I think it has taken just about four months over the winter to get an app from paper to something totally functional. The app is intended for exclusive use at the end of the day, so I won’t refer to much specifics. I had set two objectives that I wanted to accomplish when I began this project. The first is to learn my chosen tech stack: Go, Gin web framework, Postgres, htmx, JavaScript, html, and Tailwind. My second goal is to complete a piece of software that is much greater than the typical CLI apps I would build at my day job. ...

Tech Used and Learned Truly a short year to review, given I really only started developing “for real” in late September. Though I think it still has been a great wealth of experience earned! Linux: Just generally playing with a different distro like Arch. Go: A great programming language to work with and just an absolute pleasure to use! I am endorsing this 100%. Postgres: Its nuances compared to SQL Server isn’t too much different; it was easily adopted. Neovim: An excellent text editor once intimate with using. Hugo: Static site generator; just fun to use. Though I am aware it is more than capable of generating more than just a blog. Markdown: Never thought I’d be using so much markdown, but even using associated tech like mermaid and LaTeX. Radio: While not development related in itself, I have finally gotten my hands on my ham license. I am looking forward to developing some radio related software/embedded one of these days. And many others I’m sure I missed… Software Development Using Go In the realm of software development, I have been extremely happy with learning Go in the past couple of months. Learning on the go (no pun intended) is certainly one way to do it. I must attribute the seemingly natural flow of the language to be not only easy to learn, but also incredibly productive. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with a procedural language? Given I had not had any experience building a backend (nearly) from scratch, I have still outdone my own expectations. ...

Planning and Being Strategic? My Big Thinking and Planning 🤔 It’s probably been about a month since I started building out my CRUD-type project. So far, it has been fairly productive. I feel like I’ve committed a lot to muscle memory using nvim. It really allowed me to focus back on the code rather than the physical typing dexterity. At the same time, I think I’ve also gotten a nice grasp of Go; it’s like what the internet says – it’s very much like “easy” C. So far, I like it quite a lot! ...

My Journey with Neovim: Overcoming the Learning Curve ⌨️ Where I Started with Neovim In my initial blog posts I mentioned I wanted to use Neovim (or nvim, as the application is known), because I needed a highly capable yet portable editor, particularly while on the go through SSH on my iPad. As of today, I think I am confident this can definitely be my primary editor even on my non-iPad devices. ...

Blogging in Hugo 📦 An SSG alone probably isn’t the most exciting tool I’ve been using. Though I am finding that the setup around it, including environment configuration be quite a fascinating endeavour. I was finding it difficult keeping my Hugo development environment clean and in sync with my various machines. This is where I am finding big value from using Github repos. Along with using Cloudflare pages CI/CD pipeline, it has been an absolutely pleasant experience! Pages get updated soon after my latest Hugo commits and I’m done. Personally I’ve never had a chance to use pipelines like this. Even though this has been a mostly automated process, it gave me a clearer understanding of how I might build out a CI/CD pipe for future development. ...

Getting Started Again 🌱 It’s been a long time since I last focused on developing my technical skills. In my teens, I spent a lot of time self-learning programming and tinkering with computers. I fondly remember spending hours learning C and C++, as well as Perl - for some reason! It was a great time to learn these things during the rise of the internet. Sadly, I did fall behind due to many distractions. ...