V is a language I’ve been playing around with very recently and I’ve been looking for a new project to get stuck into. So I thought it was time to build another SQL database to get a feel for the language, but also provide a worthy database for the V…

I’m a big fan of TDD. BDD has always been a bit elusive to me in the sense that I wish I could use it more often. However, I always seem to end up struggling to express the same nuances through BDD that come effortlessly through a standard test case. …

Go’s error handling is very explicit. It can also be very verbose compared to other languages. I want to talk about how we can minimize the need for explicit error handling by separating what are expected and unexpected errors. Expected Errors An expected error is generally something you can test/check/verify ahead of…

Go does not have any concept of enums like some other languages. There are arguments for and against this approach which I won’t go into here. However, there are times when you want to check that switch statements contain all enum values. Especially if you intend to add new enum…

It’s a common scenario — for me at least — to be building a CLI tool (main package) that has CLI options (flags package) that I want to add unit tests to. Here’s a simple example of a CLI tool that adds or multiplies some input numbers: Let’s try…

If you need an in-memory, functional SQS client during unit tests you can now use github.com/elliotchance/mocksqs. Getting Started The simplest way to create a new SQS service is with mocksqs.New(). However, if you need queues prepopulated you can use mocksqs.NewWithQueues(): Wherever you pass around an SQS client in your application, you…

An ordered map (also called a linked hash map in Java) is a data structure that allows amortized O(1) for access and mutation just like a map, but the elements maintain their order. For this I created the github.com/elliotchance/orderedmap package. Here is some basic usage: m := orderedmap.NewOrderedMap() // Keys…

Go ships with great tools for runtime performance monitoring. However, for one of the projects I am working on I needed tailored metrics around three channels that do the primary communication between the larger components of the processing service. I wanted to be able to print realtime stats on movement…

start: display "Hi, I'm bento." What is bento? https://github.com/elliotchance/bento bento is a forth-generation programming language that is English-based. It is designed to separate orchestration from implementation as to provide a generic, self-documenting DSL that can be managed by non-technical individuals. Wow, what a mouthful… That’s a bunch of fancy talk that means that…