Author efrag

Variable scopes and shadowing in Go

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A lot of things in life are a matter of perspective and visibility and the same applies to variables in Go 😅. But what is a variable’s scope, how is it defined and what does it mean to shadow a variable in Go?

Let’s (very) loosely say that the scope of a variable declares where this variable is visible from ie. if we have declared a variable at the top of the file then it’s visible from within the entire code of that file.

We can go even deeper than that though and we can break this question down into Go specific terms.

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Sorting in Go using Bubble sort

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Go has its own package for handing sorting – called “sort” but in this post we are going to use the Go language to implement a sorting algorithm called Bubble sort.

Problem definition: Given a slice of integers sort them in ascending order

Bubble sort is an iterative comparison algorithm that sorts the elements by swapping them around if they are out of order. If a larger element comes before a smaller one => swap them and move on to the next position of the array.

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Code visualization with Gource

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Writing code has its perks for sure and for me one of these is the satisfaction of being able to think of something and then just write the code to bring it to life.

After all the writing, testing, debugging and adding and removing lines and lines of code it’s nice to be able to look back and visualize all the hard work that you have put into creating your pet project.

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String manipulation in Go

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Go documentation

I find the way that strings have been implemented in Go to be really interesting but also a bit confusing when you are first introduced to them. Go has native UTF8 support, which flows through how the source code is written to how strings and “runes” are represented (runes is the thing that really got me by surprise but more on that later). So what does Go do differently with strings that is worth mentioning?

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PhpUnit and XDebug

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If you would like to debug one of your command line scripts using PHPUnit then you need to export one of the XDEBUG_CONFIG values.

I read one post about this (unfortunately lost the link and cannot place it here as a reference) the general idea was to export the configuration for XDEBUG and then run phpunit as you would normally do. So, let’s say that you are using PHPStorm as your IDE then the script would be:

#!/bin/bash

export XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=PHPSTORM";
phpunit $@

If you name the script phpunitx then the only thing that you would need to do to run PHPUnit from the command line with XDEBUG enabled would be to invoke phpunitx instead of phpunit.