I see that Panic is shutting down their Google Drive integration in their Android app, much like iA did a few weeks ago. This doesn’t affect me directly: even though I am a user of both Android and Google Drive, I regret to say that I don’t use apps from either company on my phone (I do use a few things from both on my Apple devices). But I do wonder why Google is enacting policies that push developers away from using Drive as general purpose user storage.

Three nights ago, and two months before her 94th birthday, my Nonna, my maternal grandmother, suffered a stroke. She’s now in palliative care and there’s no telling how much longer she has left. Over the last few years she was slowing down, yet was still quite aware and was able to do many things on her own, even travel to the shops by bus. She had a scare over the weekend but was otherwise in reasonably good health.

I think I’ve settled on a goto set of tools and libraries for building web-apps in Go. It used to be that I would turn to Buffalo for these sorts of projects, which is sort of a “Ruby on Rails but for Go” type of web framework. But I get the sense that Buffalo is no longer being maintained. And although it was easy to get a project up and running, it was a little difficult to go beyond the CRUD-like layouts that it would generate (or it didn’t motivate me enough to do so).

Trying something new here. I came up with the concept of this short-story while riding home on the tram yesterday. The rest of it sort-of fell into place when I woke up at 5AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. Hope you enjoy it. Josh was riding the scooter on the city footpath, not trying super hard to avoid the other pedestrians. He was going at a speed that was both unsafe and illegal, but it was the only speed he knew that would prevent that horse from showing up.

Using PostgreSQL these last few months reminds me of just how much fun it is to work with a relational database. DynamoDB is very capable, but I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s kinda boring, actually. Not that that’s a bad thing: one could argue that “boring” is what you want from a database. Working with PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has been fun. There’s no better word to describe it. It’s been quite enjoyable designing new tables and writing SQL statements.

It’s been a while since my last rubber-ducking session. Not that I’m in the habit of seeking them out: I mainly haven’t been in a situation when I needed to do one. Well that chance came by yesterday, when I was wondering whether to put queue configuration either in the database as data, or in the environment as configuration. This one’s relatively short, as I was leaning towards one method of the other before I started.

John Gruber, discussing political spam text messages on Daring Fireball: About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number.

I enjoyed Manton’s post about the naming scheme he uses for Micro.blog servers. I see these names pop up in the logs when I go to rebuild my blog, each with a Wikipedia link explaining the origins of the name (that’s a really nice touch). Having a server or desktop naming scheme is one of those fun little things to do when working with computers. Growing up we named our home desktops after major characters of Lord of the Rings, such as Bilbo, or Frodo, but I never devised a scheme for myself when I started buying my own computers.

Here’s a feature request for Go: shamelessly copying JavaScript and adding support for the “rest” operator in literals. Go does have a rest operator, but it only works in function calls. I was writing a unit test today and I was thinking to myself that it would be nice to use this operator in both slice and struct literals as well. This could be useful for making copies of values without modifying the originals.

I’m sure everyone’s dying to hear how the mockless unit tests are going. It’s been almost two months since we started this service, and we’re smack bang in the middle of brownfield iterative development: adding new features to existing ones, fixing bugs, etc. So it seems like now is a good time to reflect on whether this approach is working or not. And so far, it’s been going quite well. The amount of code we have to modify when refactoring or changing existing behaviour is dramatically smaller than before.