String replacements in Golang are very easy using the strings package. From their docs: “Package strings implements simple functions to manipulate UTF-8 encoded strings”. Take the following sentence: "Hello World!" Now let’s say my product owner thinks saying “Hello World” with an exclamation mark is just too much, and if…

If you’re an ML.NET user and looking to train your models on GPUs, you may find you have limited options that are easy to consume. If you happen to be on a desktop that can support Nvidia GPU graphics cards you're in luck! If you happen to be on a…

Most of the projects I work with today have external dependencies of some sort. This could be a database, a cloud provider, or just another API that I need to talk to. It’s rare that I don’t have to communicate with something over a network in order to develop my…

Recently I was working on a side project and needed to switch over to another laptop to work. My project called for a Docker image that laptop #2, unfortunately, did not already have. I went to do a simple Docker pull and got the dreaded: Error response from daemon: Get…

With so many REST APIs floating around today, you’ll at some point find yourself in a situation where you need to call multiple endpoints to build a proper representation of your business object. This is not a difficult task, just create a new object, call the various APIs for data…

I wrote another article about this same topic which utilized a pure Docker solution to test database code without mocking. It was a cool solution, and worked really well, however it was a bit heavy-handed. It required special scripts, a certain folder structure, and could be hard to follow at…

Engineers these days have so many cool APIs to work with. You can literally find an API for a particular need with only a Google search. We have Twilio for sending emails/faxes/text messages, The Rundown for real-time sports scores and odds, or Airbnb to manage your listings. …

UPDATE: I’ve written a companion article using TestContainers, based on a comment that I should look into that package. It accomplishes the same goal, testing database code without mocks. You can read it here: https://atkinsonbg.medium.com/unit-test-sql-in-golang-without-mocking-using-testcontainers-go-postgres-docker-4f61574b1989 Recently while working on an API that interfaced with a database, I mistakenly updated our…

There have been many times in my career or when working on personal projects, that I have needed some open-source executables to help me complete my task. I have used things like Weasyprint, WKHTMLTOPDF, Exiftool, Ghostscript, the list goes on and on (these are just some of the more recent…