One of my new years resolutions was to learn new programming languages. Consequently, I recently set out to familiarize myself with Go. I’ve found that one of the best ways to learn a new programming language is to start with simple console programs, as well as re-implementing earlier projects. Therefore, I set out to write a console program in Go as a starting point. Project Setup The project will a simple CLI-based HTTP client that extracts some JSON from a REST API endpoint of the user’s choosing, and saves it as a .

It has been more than a year now since I originally deployed my COVID-19 Tracker to a live environment. In the time that it has been in production, I have learned a whole lot, both in terms of maintaining an app in production, and in watching the progression of the pandemic. At the very least, I have definitely come to truly appreciate how essential having something deployed to a live environment is to the learning process of being a good developer.

After recently going over some of my earliest blog posts, it dawned on me that I have been maintaining this blog for a whole year now. This realization inspired me to reflect on how and where the blog started, what’s happened since, as well as what the future might entail. In the Beginning…. The blog was without form. Well, not quite. When this blog started out, it was rather primitive. I was using Jekyll, as I had not yet done research into other static site generators, and deploying to GitHub Pages without a custom domain.

Often in our developer workflows, we find ourselves running routine, or semi-routine, and monotonous tasks. This can be things like compiling code, bootstrapping dev servers, running migrations, etc. The kind of commands that you eventually get rather tired of typing into a terminal over, and over again. These days, many developers often rely on various kinds of task runners to at least partially automate execution of these kinds of tedious and repetitive tasks.