GDPR - 1 year later

 May 25, 2019

One year has passed by the 25/05/2018, the day that the GDPR started to be enforced. Today I’d like to see how this first year of GDPR went and what we could be expecting for the future given what we have seen so far.

The first consideration that I think is obvious but interesting is that the Internet did not close down on the 25/05/2018 as many were worried. In fact, not much changed on that day. A thing that did change a lot is the number of banners asking the authorization to give some cookies to your browser. This increase of cookie banners is an interesting phenomenon since the differences between the EU cookie law and the GDPR on cookies are minor. I think this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that now companies are more worried about violating those regulations than before, thanks to the massive fines that they can incur into with the GDPR.

Bootstrap2hugo upgraded to Bootstrap 4

 April 30, 2019

For a few years now, I’ve been using Hugo for my website as well as other websites as well. My first Hugo website was my own since I wanted to learn more about the technology before suggesting it to anyone else. Back then I was not able to find any minimalistic theme I liked, and for that reason, I started my own. As you can imagine from the name, I based it on Bootstrap, version 3 since that was the current version when I started to work on it. I’ve made some minor updates over the last few years, but it was still based on Bootstrap 3. In the last couple of months I did some commits in a branch to bring it to Bootstrap 4, and today I merged them in master, so the template now is based on Bootstrap 4.

GoLang vanity urls on AWS Lambda

 March 21, 2019

After the article on the reasons to use vanity URLs in Go and the one about how to implement a lightweight vanity URLs provider, I’d like to share with you how you can leverage AWS Lambda to implement a vanity URLs provider.

The first thing we will need is to import the github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go package. This package will provide us with the needed functions to easily integrate our Go code with AWS Lambda. In our main we will just need to start the Lambda with a handler like this:

FOSDEM 2019

 February 4, 2019 -  Bruxelles, BE

This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM. As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the main event. This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room both days, being mostly in the Go room on Saturday and in the Containers room on Sunday. I made this decision since I’ve seen the advantages of last year experience, where being in the same room for a whole day allowed me to follow more talks and to stress less.

Reasons to prefer vanity URLs for GoLang packages

 January 18, 2019

Golang forces its users to use the repository URL of the dependency in the import statement.

For instance, if we want to import the “test” package that is hosted at github.com/fale/test, we will need to use github.com/fale/test. On the one hand, this is very nice since it allows anyone reading the code to immediately understand where the code is hosted and therefore find it very quickly. Also, this URL-based import path guarantees that no two different packages can have the same import path, preventing this kind of confusion for both programmers and the compiler itself. On the other hand, this is a limitation since it makes the code very reliant on the repository location.

Calling a SOAP service in Go

 December 3, 2018

Today the IT world is very focused on high performance, high throughput interfaces. In this situation, it is common to find REST and gRPC API, given their performances compared to the other solutions. Sometimes, though, we still encounter old API written with older techniques or new API that for some reasons have been developed with outdated technologies. One of those cases that I’ve encountered a few times over the last few months is SOAP.

CORS with Go and Negroni

 November 18, 2018

There are some pieces that you need to put in every microservice you write. Those are for instance logging, error handling, authentication.

Over the last year, I found myself writing over and over CORS headers. This requirement brought me to think that I should have used a Negroni middleware since we are already using Negroni for other middlewares. I started looking online for an already written one, and I found a bunch, but I was not happy with what I found, so I decided to write my own.

MongoDB's SSPL

 October 18, 2018

A couple of days ago, Eliot Horowitz, CTO & co-founder of MongoDB announced that MongoDB is moving from the AGPL to the SSPL license.

The SSPL is a new license, just created by MongoDB. In the post, Eliot points out that they created the SSPL starting from the AGPL, and he affirms that the new license guarantees all the freedoms the AGPL does. I firmly believe that the SSPL is not a FLOSS license since it limits the possibility of the cloud providers to provide an “as a service” version of it. This case might seem trivial and an edge case, but the complete freedom of usage is one of the FLOSS movement and licenses pillars.

A lightweight approach to Go vanity import paths

 September 23, 2018

Golang uses URLs for the dependencies packages resolution. To unbundle the code repository hosting the package and the import path, Golang supports the idea of Vanity Import Paths. The way this has been implemented is that, as long as the import path points to a page where Go can find the real package URL, it will follow through.

So, we will need to create a web server that can serve pages in a way that the Go toolchains can understand. To do so, I use the following code:

A small HTTP debug server in Go

 August 31, 2018

Lately, I found myself to work on an application that was communicating via SOAP with a server. My goal was to understand how this application worked with the SOAP server to emulate its behavior. Even if I had access to the source code of the application, I thought it would have been easier, faster and more fun to do the work without actually reading the code. It’s important to note that actually, the application is fairly small and self-contained. Otherwise, I would have probably taken a different approach.