Highlights

• I published the first chapter of my book and was happy with the reception.
• My attempt to hire a book cover designer flopped.
• I may have figured out how to support large files on PicoShare.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Finish two chapters of Refactoring English

• Result: Finished one chapter and got 75% through the next.
• Grade: B

The first chapter took longer than I expected, as I kept finding parts that I wanted to rewrite. I did find it helpful to take a break for a week to write a second chapter and come back fresh.

There’s an excellent Go testing pattern that too few people know. I can teach it to you in 30 seconds.

Instead of writing Go tests like this:

// The common, unrefined way.
username := GetUser()
if username != "dummyUser" {
 t.Errorf("unexpected username: got %s, want: %s", username, "dummyUser")
}

Write your tests like this, beginning each assertion with if got, want :=:

// The underused, elegant way.
if got, want := GetUser(), "dummyUser"; got != want {
 t.Errorf("username=%s, want=%s", got, want)
}

The if got, want :=: pattern works even better in table-driven tests. Here’s an example from my library for parsing social media handles: