Playing with Language Models
Since the launch of GPT3, and more notably ChatGPT, I’ve had a ton of fun learning about and playing with emerging tools in the language model space.
Thought Eddies
Ways to improve your team's code quality
I believe it is important for engineers to care about code quality. Some teams and companies make specific and targeted efforts to keep the quality of their codebases high. The existence of activities like "spring cleaning", "test Fridays", "Fixit week" and others assert the importance of code...
Pipelines and your Unix toolbox
Unix commands are great for manipulating data and files. They get even better when used in shell pipelines. The following are a few of my go-tos -- I'll list the commands with an example or two. While many of the commands can be used standalone, I'll provide examples that assume the input is piped...
Go and UNIX files
I ran into an odd UNIX filename issue while writing Go code the other day.
Debugging go code with delve
Delve is a debugger for the Go programming language. The goal of the project is to provide a simple, full featured debugging tool for Go.
Go scope
Scoping in Go is built around the notion of code blocks. You can find several good explanations of how variable scoping work in Go on Google. I'd like to highlight one slightly unintuitive consequence of Go's block scoping if you're used to a language like Python, keeping in mind, this example does...
Tracking a call stack in Go with context
The use of context in Go can help you pass metadata through your program with helpful, related information about a call. Let's build an example where we set a context key, "stack", which keeps a history of the function names called over the lifetime of the context. As we pass the context object...
Go channels
Go uses goroutines to execute multiple bits of code at the same time. Channels allow for the aggregation of the results of these concurrent calls after they have finished.
Go closures
Say we need a map to store various versions of a configuration in Go. Here is a simple example of the structure:
Custom Markdown rendering
Markdown is useful tool -- these blog posts are written in it. I like Markdown because once you learn it, it feels invisible. It is minimal and intuitive. However, sometimes you need it to do things a little differently.