Common kestrel
In the afternoon what I believe to be a common kestrel, Falco tinnunculus, landed on our fence. I was too slow with my iPhone 6S to take a photo of the bird.
Container networking is simple
Working with containers always feels like magic. In a good way for those who understand the internals and in a terrifying - for those who don't. Luckily, we've been looking under the hood of the containerization technology for quite some time already and even managed to uncover that containers are just isolated and restricted Linux processes, that images aren't really needed to run containers, and on the contrary - to build an image we need to run some containers.
Now comes a time to tackle the container networking problem. Or, more precisely, a single-host container networking problem. In this article, we are going to answer the following questions:
- How to virtualize network resources to make containers think each of them has a dedicated network stack?
- How to turn containers into friendly neighbors, prevent them from interfering, and teach to communicate well?
- How to reach the outside world (e.g. the Internet) from inside the container?
- How to reach containers running on a machine from the outside world (aka port publishing)?
Source: Container networking is simple, an article by Ivan Velichko.
Non-Blocking Parallelism for Services in Go
Go has plenty of useful builtin functionality for safe, concurrent and parallel code. However neat those features may be, they cannot write your program for you. As is the case for many languagges, the most important morsels of knowledge are not in the features of the language, but in the well-known patterns that compose those features into solutions that can address frequently reoccurring problems. I’m relatively new to using Go as my daily bread-and-butter language and recently encountered a useful pattern that I thought worth sharing. I’m told that at Palantir it is called the tickler pattern.
Source: Non-Blocking Parallelism for Services in Go, an article by Peter Goldsborough.
Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing
André Garzia made a nice blog post called “Lua, a misunderstood language” recently, and unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) a bulk of HN comments on it was about the age-old 0-based vs. 1-based indexing debate. You see, Lua uses 1-based indexing, and lots of programmers claimed this is unnatural because “every other language out there” uses 0-based indexing.
I’ll brush aside quickly the fact that this is not true — 1-based indexing has a long history, all the way from Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Ada, Smalltalk, etc. — and I’ll grant that the vast majority of popular languages in the industry nowadays are 0-based. So, let’s avoid the popularity contest and address the claim that 0-based indexing is “inherently better”, or worse, “more natural”.
Source: Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing, an article by Hisham H. Muhammad.