Advent of Code 2023 in OCaml - Day 1

A good way to learn a new programming language is to jump in and solve some practice exercises. At the end of each year Advent of Code release a new coding exercise each day until Christmas. It has become fairly popular over the years. [Read More]

Configuration Languages: A Balance of Constraints

Configuration is a topic that is often debated among software teams. It’s one of those issues that every engineer has an (often strong) opinion about and there isn’t a definitive right or wrong answer. Even something as basic as the method for passing config to an application can be tough... [Read More]

Testing Go web services using interfaces and mocks

As software engineers, we need to have confidence that the solutions we put into production are of the highest quality. This not only allows us to sleep better at night, but it’s important for the business to have faith in the quality of the product. One of the most effective... [Read More]

JSON Web Tokens for authentication in distributed systems

Starting out with a software project, authentication is usually quite a simple problem to solve. You simply create a users table in the database, collect users’ usernames and passwords (hashed and salted), and authenticate users against it. Just about every framework has a built-in way of doing authentication that can... [Read More]

Top 4 best WiFi coffee shops in Cape Town

I’m a software developer. My existence depends upon being connected to the net. I, like many other software developers, enjoy taking my laptop to the coffee shop, drinking coffee while reading up on the latest Hacker News articles or reading up on new programming languages. In order to do this,... [Read More]