A Class Factory in Golang (Google Go)

Do you know what a class factory is and why is it useful?  Ever considered implementing a class factory in Golang (Google Go) even though Go is not considered fully object oriented in nature? Are you curious about some awesome features in Go other than it’s impressive concu...

Evangelism is NOT Sales

I recently had a discussion with a CFO of a technology company. We were meeting because he is trying to better understand the role technical evangelism could play within his company. Ten minutes into our conversation he said, “so evangelism is pretty much rogue sales”...

Go Compiler nil Pointer Checks

Introduction I was thinking about how the compiler looks to protect the code we write when it can. Invalid memory access checks are one type of safety check the compiler adds to our code. We might think that this "extra code" is hurting our performance and maybe over bi...

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge - Go Style

If you have not heard about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge I would be surprised. It’s everywhere nowadays, being done by celebrities alike. After being challenged by my children there was only one person, or should I say Gopher, I knew I needed to nominate. The Gopher took to...

Install JDK on OSX Yosemite

For some reason, Oracle blocked the installers to run only on a fixed OSX version range with a nice and explanatory error message. This range doesn’t include Yosemite, which makes sense, since nobody running Yosemite will ever want to write some Java. Anyway, here is how to...

Java 8

Earlier this year, the new version of the Java Programming Language was released. Finally, it enters in the field of the “cool peeps” with some features it should have since years ago, like Lambdas. “Java developers are now Hipsters again!” —...

Automatically Deploy A Revel Web Application

Introduction The websites that power GopherAcademy and GopherCon are written using Revel, which is a very nice framework for building web applications. Go has a great built-in HTTP server, but there are times when you don’t want to roll-your-own web framework.

Pointers vs References

Some languages including C, C++ support pointers. Other languages including C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP all support references. On the surface both references and pointers are very similar, both are used to have one variable provide access to another. With both providin...

Ice Cream Makers and Data Races Part II

Introduction Dave Cheney published a post called Ice Cream Makers and Data Races. The post showed an example of an interesting data race that can occur when using an interface typed variable to make a method call. If you have not read the post yet please do. Once you read the pos...

Actionable Data With MongoDB and Go

Introduction If you are building any kind of application for a consumer based product, it is common to have large amounts of application data being generated about your users. Running reports is a traditional use of this data, but what if you could make this data actionable? What...