I think there’s safety in saying that this year’s Microblogvember was tough, what with all the travelling and inability to come up with something decent for the prompt. While it was fun, I think I need the break. Until next year. 👋 #mbnov

I usually eat two or three cans of tuna for lunch a week. And yet, I still don’t really consider myself a fish eater. Why? What needs to change before I can tell myself that yes, I eat fish? Do I have to eat actual fish? Must I eat fish for dinner? What are the rules here? #mbnov

I use to be quite religious in putting two spaces after a full stop. The only exception was when I’m writing on Micro.blog, since it keeps the character count down. But now, I’ve been noticing this trend extend to other time I need to write in a web browser. #mbnov

I heard the best way to get motivated to do something is to say to yourself “do it for five minutes and if it isn’t working out, you can stop.” I’ve tried it and it works. Sure, you may stop, but usually you’ll just carry on with the task. #mbnov

Massive delay to my flight on the weekend. What was originally a morning departure is now an evening one. But I think the new itinerary actually works out better than what it was so I’m actually quite happy about it.

Revived my silly little online finska scorecard and gave it a new domain name: finska.fun. This is in preparation for the summer, where playing a game or two of finska is becoming a bit of a ritual. #mbnov

I’ve been approaching Microblogvember by taking the prompt and writing a post around it, which results in posts that are a bit forced. A better way might be to write a regular post that includes the prompt. That way I retain my usual relaxed attitude towards posting here. #mbnov

You’d think I’d have a post with the word update in it. I use “update” at work all the time: apply this update to update the database and push the update. But racking my brain over the last hour or so, I couldn’t come up with an update with an “update”. #mbnov

Back home from Canberra. But only for a few days and then I’m off to the US. Should be good but I’m not looking forward to that 14 hour flight across the Pacific.

I hate days that involve airports or air travel in any capacity. Not so much the actual flying part; that’s all fine. It’s just all the things around timing or rendezvous that give me such anxiety. Very tricky thinking about anything else.

Oof, scrum ceremonies really take it out of me. 3.5 to 4 hours of meetings, usually hosted by me and with me doing all the talking. Really kills my voice.

I’m using Goreleaser to build releases of Audax tools, since it works quite well in cross-compiling a Go program to various OS targets in a single run. I use this in a GitHub actions. Whenever I create a tag, the release pipeline will kick-off a run of Goreleaser, which will cross-compile Dynamo-Browse, package it, and publishing it to GitHub itself.

Recently, I found a bug in the MacOS Brew release of Dynamo-Browse. When the user tries to press c to copy the current item, the entire program will crash with a panic. I tracked the cause to the clipboard package that I’m using. Apparently, it requires Cgo to be usable on Darwin, and it will panic if CGO is not enabled¹. But the GitHub action I was using was an Ubuntu runner. And since the package required some symbols from Foundation, which was only available on Darwin, I couldn’t just enable CGO.

However, I did learn that GitHub Actions actually supports MacOS runners. I don’t know why I didn’t think they wouldn’t. I guess, much like most of my experience with anything Apple, it would come at some sort of price. So you can imagine my delight in learning about this. And the first thing I did was try to use them in the release pipeline.

I first tried blindly switching from ubuntu-latest to macos. Sadly, it didn’t work as expected. It Turns out that the macos runners do not have Docker installed, which broke a number of the actions I was using. And since the original ubuntu-latest runner worked well for the Linux and Windows releases, I didn’t want to just junk them.

So what I did was split the release pipeline into three separate jobs:

• The first, running on ubuntu-latest, builds Audax tools and runs the tests to verify that the code is in working order.
• The second, also running on ubuntu-latest, will invoke the Goreleaser action to build the Windows & Linux targets.
• At the same time, the third, running on macos, will install Goreleaser via brew and run it to build the MacOS target.

The resulting pipeline looks a little like this:

name: release
on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    services:
      # localstack Docker image
    steps:
      # Checkout, build test
  release-linux:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Checkout
      - name: Release
        uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v1
        if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')
        with:
          version: latest
          args: release -f linux.goreleaser.yml --skip-validate --rm-dist
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
  release-macos:
    needs: build
    runs-on: macos-12
    steps:
      # Checkout
      - name: Setup Goreleaser
        run: |
          # Can't use goreleaser/goreleaser-action as that requires Docker
          # So need to launch it and run it using the shell.
          brew install goreleaser/tap/goreleaser
          brew install goreleaser
      - name: Release
        if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')
        run: |
          goreleaser release -f macos.goreleaser.yml --skip-validate --rm-dist
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          HOMEBREW_GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.HOMEBREW_GITHUB_TOKEN }}

I’ve only used this to make a small maintenance release that fixes the clipboard panic problem, and so far it seems to work quite well.

After doing this, I also learnt that there’s actually a Goreleaser Docker image which could theoretically be used to cross-compile with CGO. I haven’t tried it, and honestly it sounds like too much trouble than it’s worth. Rather keep things simple.

Enjoyed another trip to Tuggeranong this morning. Went to the same cafe, ordered the same breakfast. I think I even sat in the same seat. It’s almost like a repeat of last time. #mbnov