matttproud.com (blog)

I am coming off from surgery right now and have some time on my hands, so I wanted to share a story about a learning experience.This post is a bit of a dual purpose one on a teachable moment as a software engineer - a chance to offer a retrospective from

If you asked me where I fall in the AI camp, I'm in the skeptical-but-curious quadrant (example). Notwithstanding the various legitimate critiques of what everyone is calling AI and doing with it, I have been finding some interesting utility with it in my

Today, driven by annoyance, I refactor-extracted a small set of test helper code found in various private personal projects around the topic of golden file management into a dedicated Go module: github.com/matttproud/goldentest (API documentation). I'm ha

I'd like to share a design pattern with Go that I really find particularly elegant. It orients itself around hermetic, testable configuration using command line flags. But before I do, I need to put three questions to you since they determine if you need

If you've ever read the Go FAQ, it contains a section on testing frameworks that features some provocative language that I'll quote verbatim below:A related point is that testing frameworks tend to develop into mini-languages of their own, with conditiona

This is a smaller piece that I broke off from a larger article. It's in the space of Go minutiae, but it's worth considering if you plan on developing full mastery of the language ecosystem.So let's start out with a question: what happens when you run go

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex:Oh, my old friend. How it's been a long time.Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from D

A recent post by Julia Evans prompted me to share a little trick I have been using in UNIX-like shells for a significant part of my life. It's called fc (short for

Conventionally software engineers have reasoned with how expensive a test is by classifying how it exercises the system under test (SUT): unit, integration, or functional. Each successive one being more - for some definition of -

I've been thinking about errors in Go quite a bit lately and what has been bothering me about the practice of error design and usage in the community. The critique starts with this code:1 2 3 if err != nil { return err } It's such a common piece of code t