I recently spent too much time learning about the technologies that undergird my home network.
It came about because we recently built a study in the back garden for me to use when I’m working from home. One question that remained open throughout the build was what the network setup would be. I had four critical devices: my laptop, my phone and a pair of Sonos speakers.
The basic connection to the outdoor study is an ethernet cable running from the house. Due to the location of my router, however, that cable is hooked into my home network via the LAN port on a Google Wifi mesh access point. I wanted to have a further wifi access point in the study, connected to the ethernet cable, for my laptop, phone and speakers. I didn’t really have much confidence, however, in using a two wifi network hop between my router (and, hence, ISP) and my laptop. It just felt weird. Too many network gizmos to work.
Buuuuut, I really, really, really wanted it to work. What better excuse to deep dive on layer two networks to figure out how wild this network really is?! So I put on my sleuthing hat and decided to figure out whether this unholy pile of network was going to work, from the network frames upwards 🕵️
What follows is the picture I put together for myself. While I’ve tried to make it accurate, there’s a bunch of (somewhat educated!) guesswork going on where I tried to apply theory to my actual devices and network.
Much of Go’s standard library is basic at first sight, but can take you a long way. http is like that. flag is also like that. I think the flag package is unfairly maligned as underpowered.
Initially, it does seem that you are limited to simple constructions: the binary, then some named flags:
> greet --name Mike
Hi Mike!
But flag supports so much more than this. Let’s dig in to what you can do.
On and off for the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a theme for VS Code. It’s a light version of my favourite dark theme, Monokai Pro. Sadly I can’t share it as it amalgamates two different VS Code themes, one person’s theme suggestions in a GitHub comment and my own tweaks. I’ve no idea how that works for licensing, so I’m playing it safe.
Instead, I’ll share how I got there, because sometimes it’s good to read about a journey. If it inspires you, all the better.
I often believe that I need to write something completely new. But as I read more and more leadership articles, I realise that a lot of them cover the same ground. Even so, I find value in reading multiple takes and adaptations on the same idea. So I can write my own thoughts and contribute to this variety of interpretations. And, anyway, there is value for myself in writing down my versions of things, so I might as well. Here’s one of those things.
This is an idea I came across several years ago. It helped me to understand why creating alignment between individuals and teams is so important to the success of an organisation. It’s the notion that one can use vectors to model how individuals in an organisation contribute to the whole, and why aligned teams are so powerful.
I recently ported github-to-omnifocus to Go. One new thing I learned is that it’s easy to embed files into Go binaries, extending Go’s “single file” deployment simplicity to include required non-Go resources.
In this case, I needed to call JXA scripts from Go. In github-to-omnifocus, these are required to interface with Omnifocus itself; they create, read, update and complete tasks. I wanted a single binary executable still, and feared I’d need to embed the JXA scripts as strings within the binary. That would make them hard to debug as I’d not be able to run them standalone. Fortunately, Go 1.16 introduced compiler support for embedding files into Go binaries, alongside an API to read them at runtime.