Worked a little more on Photo Bucket this week. Added the ability to export the contents of an instance to a Zip file. This consist of both images and metadata. I’ve went with lines of JSON file for the image metadata. I considered a CSV file briefly, but for optional fields like captions and custom properties, I didn’t like the idea of a lot of empty columns. Better to go with a format that’s a little more flexible, even if it does mean more text per line.

Spent a bit more time working on Photo Bucket this last week1, particularly around galleries. They’re progressing quite well. I’m made some strides in getting two big parts of the UI working now: adding and removing images to galleries, and re-ordering gallery items via drag and drop. I’ll talk about re-ordering first. This was when I had to bite the bullet and start coding up some JavaScript. Usually I’d turn to Stimulus for this but I wanted to give HTML web components a try.

It’s interesting to hear what others like to look at during their spare time, like setting up Temporal clusters or looking at frontend frameworks built atop five other frameworks built on React. I guess the thinking is that since we use it for our jobs, it’s helpful to keep abreast of these technologies. Not me. Not any more. Back in the day I may have though similar. I may even have had a passing fancy at stuff like this, revelling in its complexity with the misguided assumption that it’ll equal power (well, to be fair, it would equal leverage).

Years: 2017 — 2020 Status: Gone I once worked at a company that was responsible for sending SMS messages via an API. Think one time passwords when you log into websites, before time-based OTP apps were a thing. And yeah, this did involve some “marketing” messages, although we were pretty strict about outright spam or phishing messages. Anyway, since sending messages costed us money, we had a simulator setup in our non-prod environments which we used for testing.

I wish Go’s approach to loading database drivers didn’t involve implicitly importing them as packages. At least that way, package authors would be more likely to get the driver from the caller, rather than load a driver themselves. I’ve been bitten by this recently, twice. I’m using a GitHub Linux driver to build an ARM version of something that needs to use SQLite. As far as I can tell, it’s not possible to build an ARM binary with CGO enabled with these runners (at-least, not without installing a bunch of dependencies — I’m not that desperate yet).

I’m torn between extracting auth credentials in the handler from a Go Context and passing them as arguments to service methods, or just passing the context and having the service methods get it from the Context themselves. Previously, when the auth credentials just had a user ID, we were doing the former. But we’re now using more information about what the user has access to and if we were to continue doing this, we’ll need to pass more parameters through to the service layer.

I’m torn between extracting auth credentials in the handler from a Go Context and passing them as arguments to service methods, or just passing the context and having the service methods get it from the Context themselves. Previously, when the auth credentials just had a user ID, we were doing the former. But we’re now using more information about what the user has access to and if we were to continue doing this, we’ll need to pass more parameters through to the service layer.

I’ve been having occasional trouble with the debugger in Goland. Every attempt to debug a test would just fail with the following error: /usr/local/go/bin/go tool test2json -t /Applications/GoLand.app/… API server listening at: 127.0.0.1:60732 could not launch process: EOF Debugger finished with the exit code 1 My previous attempts at fixing this — upgrading Go and Goland — did get it working for a while, but recently it’s been happening to me again.

If anyone else is weary about posting about what projects they’re working on, fearing that others would think they’re showing off or something, here’s two bits of evidence that I hope would allay these fears: Exhibit 1: I’m a bit of a fan of the GMTK YouTube channel. Lots of good videos there about game development that, despite not being a game developer myself, I find facinating. But the playlist I enjoy the most is the one where Mark Brown, the series creator, actually goes through the process of building a game himself.

Looks like Github’s locked down the access rights of the GITHUB_TOKEN recently. This is the token that’s available to all Github actions by default. After taking a GoReleaser config file from an old project and using it in a new one, I encountered this error when GoReleaser tried to publish the binaries as part of a Github Release: failed to publish artifacts: could not release: PATCH https://api.github.com/repos/lmika/<project>/releases/139475588: 403 Resource not accessible by integration [] After a quick search, I found this Github issue which seemed to cover the same problem.