#golang pro-tip: Fallthrough literally falls through to the *next* case statement, no matter what the next `case xxxx` statement checks. Fallthrough does not continue checking case statements and it doesn't jump to the `default:` statement.

In case you were looking for something to wear on a night around town.

my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, was Anne Frank’s neighbor in Amsterdam, and Oma thinks this comparison is perfectly apt

In the world of professional cryptographers, the question is a settled matter: as of early 2026, Signal is the best encrypted messaging app for all but the most utterly pathological of edge cases.

All of these ICE and CBP mf'ers deserve to be in jail. Congress needs to end qualified immunity. Being a state or federal officer does not *lower* the bar for your actions, it *raises* it. You are supposed to be trained. You are supposed to defend our rights, not violate them.

One of the most important powers of a senior engineer is the ability to say "No", and have people actually listen. Do not hesitate to use this power to protect your team and your project. Many people will ask "how" to accomplish something, but few will ask *if* this is a thing that should be done.

ICE, evidently

#golang hot tip - if an interface is 95% Getters, you should probably instead use plain old struct fields, and use logic at creation time to populate the fields differently for different types. Separating logic and data will make your code easier to maintain and understand.

Today's task: Trying to convince product that we don't need special logic to mark a particular category of requests as free... when those requests only amount to 0.2% of the average user's costs anyway. This is like buying a $10 meal and worrying about whether they charge you 2 cents for the straw.

The most important thing you can do when building an HTTP API is to define a json error response body and unique response codes. HTTP status codes are *not* sufficient. Clients need more detail to provide a good UX for users. There are a million things that can cause a 400 Bad Request, for example.

This is not the post apocalyptic RPG I was promised.

This week at work, we learned about how overloading the CPU can cause your process to get killed for using too much memory. It's unintuitive at first, but in the context of an API server, it makes sense once you think through it. Here's what was happening:

Perhaps a 🌶️ take: Do not rely on docker / codespaces / env variables / setup scripts to make your dev environment function. Doing a git pull should *never* break the dev experience. Make fixes for the dev environment in-code, so that updating the code is all you need to do to continue working.

Unpopular opinion on HTTP APIs - just use POST for everything and never put variables in your routes. Spent like an hour yesterday debugging weird behavior. Turns out, I was hitting the wrong route accidentally, because our routes overlapped in non-obvious ways.

When designing the errors that you return to 3rd parties (whether from an API or SDK) please default to not returning sensitive data in your error messages. I've spent SO MUCH TIME handling bugs where we log customer data or return sensitive provider info from our API because of this.

Unpopular opinion, but the "options" pattern in Go is just bad. The biggest problem is that it greatly hinders discoverability. I type foo.NewBar( and my IDE shows the signature includes ...foo.BarOptions. What are the options? Dunno. I have to look through all functions in the package. #golang

Saw a post on reddit about dependency injection in Go and... please don't use libraries for that stuff. DI in Go should be just "create a value in main.go, pass it to a struct that takes an interface for it. If other structs need a copy, pass it along." That's it. That's dependency injection in go.

This is 100% correct. AI isn't going to tell you that your assumptions are wrong, that product management changed their mind about that last week, that we tried that before and it doesn't work... etc. But it is definitely like a pretty smart linter that you don't need to configure ahead of time.

Got issued new debit cards from Capital One. Noticed they were Discover branded. I thought - they're debit cards, no way they won't be accepted at places that "don't take discover" right? Wrong! Good job, Capital One. You've forced me to find a new bank.

Oftentimes, the simple solution is the best one. If your traffic is fairly predictable, you don't need auto scaling, you just need a chron job that scales up during your busy times. It'll be way easier to implement, debug, and maintain.

Please just use ints. If a number (like an ID or a length) should always be positive .... you should use a (signed) int. Why? Because it prevents bugs. If you calculate a length to be -2 bytes, that's clearly a bug. If you are converting that to a uint32, it becomes 4294967294.

Was watching Ready Player One with the kids and I noticed one of the bombs they throw in the game was one of these and wow, core memory unlocked there. I haven't seen or thought of these in like 40 years. Evidently they're called Madballs. I'm sure I had some when I was like 8.

Somebody yelled at me for posting about Ganymede instead of /the state of things/ last night. I know we’re (almost) all on the same page here, but a Bluesky without cute cats, science facts, and dumb jokes would be bad for everyone.

Anyone have tips on how to teach people to perform thorough code reviews? I am a very thorough reviewer, but I'm not sure how to teach someone else how to look for problems in a PR. Not specific to #golang but also that is the language I am using :)

This is what I've been working on recently. Full GitHub Copilot for $0 forever.

Me: a signed 64 bit should be good enough to store the value of an auto-increment ID Coworker: but sometimes we ship bugs that burn through millions of IDs! Me: <mathing> if you burned a billion IDs per second, you wouldn't exceed MAX_INT64 for 292 years 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is *really* big

Ok, so I was initially pissed that "Biden pardoned his son", but this piece from Rachel Maddow changed my mind. tl;dw - For years, the Republicans have been singling out Hunter in order to hurt Biden, and would continue to do so, with even more impunity and cruelty in the next administration.

Wtf. Pardoning your son. You know, I was just thinking a couple weeks ago that the president really should not have the power to unilaterally overturn our judicial system. But I was thinking of Trump and the Jan 6 insurrectionists. Biden just gave Trump cover to pardon whoever the fuck he wants.

Upgraded from a 2021 intel mac to the M3 an holy crap. Maybe it's just lack of cruft, but this thing feels *noticeably* faster than the old one. Opening up slack is super fast and doesn't immediately send the fan into helicopter mode.

I guess I'm over here now. Thank goodness for Sky Follower Bridge letting me find all the people I followed on the bird site that shall not be named.

Forgot to mention... this is what my team has been directly working on for the last... while :) Very exciting to see it out in the wild.

GitHub Copilot bringing support for more models today, including models from Anthropic and Google: github.blog/news-insight...