The post Writing Bubble Sort in Go from Scratch first appeared on Qvault.

Bubble sort is named for the way elements “bubble up” to the top of the list. Bubble sort repeatedly steps through a slice and compares adjacent elements, swapping them if they are out of order. It continues to loop over the slice until the whole list is completely sorted.

Full example of the bubble sort algorithm

func bubbleSort(input []int) []int {
    swapped := true
    for swapped {
        swapped = false
        for i := 1…

The post Check for Standards Before Creating a New One first appeared on Qvault.

I recently had a ticket opened on my team’s backlog board requesting the ability to bypass our API’s caching system. For context, our front-end team uses my team’s API to make fairly heavy requests to ElasticSearch, and one of the features of our API gateway is to cache the results of heavy aggregations for ~30 seconds. It turns out, every once in a while they need to run two of the same query within the ~30-second caching window and want an updated result set.

The request…

The post Earn Money While Promoting Computer Science Education first appeared on Qvault.

We just launched our new affiliate partner program to give Dev bloggers and influencers everywhere an opportunity to make some serious cash while promoting a great educational project. Here are the high-level details:

• You earn 50% of each purchase made on Qvault by people who use your referral link
• It takes less than 5 minutes to sign up
• Payments go directly to your PayPal account
• You’re provided a dashboard to track your performance of clicks and conversions
• You’re helping to promote affordable coding and computer science education…

The post Should You Commit the Vendor Folder in Go? first appeared on Qvault.

The answer to the age-old question of, “should I commit the vendor dependencies in my Go project to source control?” is “almost always“. Let’s take a look at the reasoning behind my claim that committing dependencies is ideal.

What Is the Vendor Folder?

If you are coming from Node.js land, Golang’s vendor folder is basically the same as Node’s node_modules. It is a folder found at the root of a module that stores a copy of all the code the module depends on. The code is used to compile the final…

The post How to Properly Use Defer in Golang first appeared on Qvault.

What is the “defer” keyword in Go?

In the Go programming language, defer is a keyword that allows developers to delay the execution of a function until the current function returns. What throws some people off is that the deferred function’s arguments are evaluated immediately, but the function itself doesn’t fire until the wrapping function exits.

Simple defer example — hello world

func main() {
    defer fmt.Println("world") // deferred until main() exits
    fmt.Println("hello")
 }

// prints:
// hello
// world

When would you want to defer something?

After programming in Go, it’s really hard to remember how I dealt with closing connections or files in other languages…

The post Comprehensive Guide to Dates and Times in Go first appeared on Qvault.

Keeping track of time in code has long been a developer’s nightmare. While no language or package manages time perfectly, I’m of the opinion that Golang does a pretty good job out-of-the-box. This full tutorial is designed to answer ~90% of the questions you’ll have about managing time in Go.

Table of Contents

• Overview — How dates and times are stored in Go
• Get the current time with time.Now()
• Create a time object for a specific date
• Printing, parsing, and formatting times in Go
• Time durations
• Convert between separate…

The post Continuous Deployments != Continuous Disruptions first appeared on Qvault.

Luckily, I’ve met very few engineers in my career who are outright opposed to continuous deployment. That said, I have met some, and I think their hesitation is usually rooted in the myth that continuous causes more disruptions to end-users than a batched release cycle.

What is continuous deployment?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of why continuous deployment (CD) is almost always better than batched releases, let’s define some terms. Atlassian’s definition of CD is close, but I’m going to modify it a bit for my purposes. …

The post The 10x Meeting — Solving for Too Many Meetings first appeared on Qvault.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the fabled 10x developer (or 10x engineer) — the one on the team that’s 10x as productive as their average colleague. While many, including myself, doubt the existence of such people, I do think there are meetings that are 10x as productive as the average meeting. My goal in this article is to break down their properties so we can have 10x fewer meetings.

What’s the purpose of a meeting?

Meetings are a communication mechanism. …