Author efrag

Go routines and thread safe data structures

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A simple definition of Go routines is found the “Tour of Go” section about concurrency:

a Go routine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime

Now if you have not come across threads before, threads is a way for a program to run parts of itself in some sort of concurrent way. In this post we are going to examine the differences between running a program sequentially, using Go routines and Wait Groups and we are going to talk about thread safe access to a data structure. So… Let’s get started 💪!

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5 things to sort out as a multi-lingual software engineer

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Writing code and building software is fun no matter which language one uses. But what we have found is that there is no “language to rule them all”. There are a number of languages out there each with its own quirks, strengths and weaknesses and that’s just amazing.

So where does that leave us as software engineers? We will probably need to pick up more than one languages as we go along, but what’s the best way to go about that?

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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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