Summary

Two releases for Mudmap and two weeks in Perth

Mudmap

1. System update available widget
2. Installed packages table

After finishing up the above features I took an extended break from all things code. I still took my laptop away but never really felt the need to open it up. My holiday back home was far too relaxing!

System Update Available

In pfSense, on the main dashboard, it tells if the version is up-to-date or if a newer version is available.

Mudmap now does this too. A small quality of life improvement but another step in replicating the pfSense experience within Mudmap.

This was simple for customers who are on the API version 1.5.0 and above. However, it needed to be backwards compatible for users that aren’t. Quite a few are using the older version and I did not want to prompt them to upgrade. This meant checking their currently installed version and providing a fallback for them. This fallback indicates that they should update and provides a link with how to do so.

Installed Packages

Another quality of life improvement. Users can now check which third party packages are installed and their versions. It is read-only, as in they cannot upgrade from Mudmap, but it is a start.

The inclusion of the system update and installed packages means auditing devices got a little easier.

Random Mobility Workout of the Day (MWOD)

This was something I knocked up in two evenings to service my own simple needs.

I love watching and following along with Kelly Starret. When I was in the military the MWOD gave me a lot of relief from pain. Its tough work doing cool shit! Since I’ve become a desk warrior I sort of let it go but that has brought its own problems. I have new musculoskeletal pains.

Anyway, I built this to prompt me each day with a random workout to perform. It’s a Go app using templates to pull a list of 160+ videos from YouTube and embed them in the site. Go plus Sqlite makes life pretty easy. Codebase

Check it out, here

Cookiecutter’s

I also knocked up a couple of [cookiecutter] application templates. This was the fist time I’ve created my own. I took inspiration from Simon Willison’s Click-App cookiecutter approach.

For most of my CLI applications I use bonzai, which supports nested composition meaning I can include multiple Bonzai apps in one. The hard part is creating a new Bonzai app - it required cloning, or using a template from GitHub. I didn’t like this because the template has a load of boilerplate I don’t need.

Instead, I now create new Bonzai apps using cookiecutter https://github.com/danielmichaels/bonzai-app. It’s pretty handy for my use case and I think most people could knock up a unique cookiecutter for themselves in a couple of hours.

Taking heed to my advice above, and just as I was about to start building out Random MWOD I decided this was a good opportunity to create a Go web app cookiecutter.

I like my Go web apps as a starting point to use go-chi, tailwind and alpine. So I created the cookiecutter to build a minimal app with these tools. It also uses air for hot-reloading and goose for database migrations.

This highly opinionated cookiecutter can be found, here.

Recommendations

Book: 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (link)

I write a decent amount of Go but there are various parts of the language which have tripped my up in the past. This book covers all the issues I’ve ever footgunned myself with. Each one explained well with not just why it happened but also the methods to fix it.

For any Go developer I think its worthwhile reading. So far I’ve learned a lot more about slices (under the hood), strings (particularly the importance of Runes) and solidified my knowledge in control structures.

There is usually a few ways of achieving things in programming. Something I really like about this book is that the author is opinionated about why x thing is the best method. When there are caveats those are well explained, too.

For instance, when checking if a slice is empty the best way is to check its length. This will trap both nil and empty slices.

// checks for nil and empty
// empty slices have a len of zero and nil slices are always empty
if len(foo) == 0 { 
	return false
}

I’m only about 40% of the way through, and I’ve referenced it a couple of times already. Another thing which is really neat; succinct little sections for each Go Mistake. This means you can easily pick it up whenever you’ve got a spare moment and it reads well on Kindle.

Beach Mode

The rest of this month was me soaking up rays at Perth’s beautiful beaches.