We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took to debug it. I tried to write down relevant details as they came up, so see if you can guess what the bug is while reading along.

I just learned that
you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really
cool.

The solution to all of these problems

I humbly put forward that modern web development provides us all the utilities to move away from class names and implement something much more robust, with some fairly straightforward changes:

Attributes

Attributes allow us to parameterise a component using a key-value representation, very similar to Map<string, T>. Browsers come with a wealth of selector functions to parse the values of an attribute.

This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.

Security testing starts with understanding vulnerabilities. The CVE website lists known software flaws. The OWASP Top Ten highlights common weaknesses. With this knowledge, we can improve our Go development. This article shows how to put in place robust practices. They are to: fuzz inputs, verify dependencies, and use static analysis tools (SAST).

There's a concept that I've heard called by a lot of different names, but my favorite name for it is …

A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability

Most programming language ecosystems provide assert functions in their testing libraries but not Go's. Go's standard testing package follows a more direct and to-the-point approach.

Featureful zsh prompt.

Go programming language is known to be easy to use. Thanks to its well-thought syntax, features and tooling, Go allows writing easy-to-read…

Hard disagree on this one, but still interesting.

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).

piku, inspired by dokku, allows you do git push deployments to your own servers, no matter how small they are.