Hi, I’m John Arundel, programming mentor and author of various books on software engineering and tech careers. I’ve been writing software for about 40 years, and I think I’m starting to figure out how to do it. Join my Code Club to find out more!
Money: how to get people to give it to you, how much to ask for, and how to be worth what you're asking. Some real talk about the challenges you’ll face as a newly independent worker.
iota is a neat feature of Go that lets us create “enums”: lists of constants with arbitrary values. Let’s find out how to use iota, with this quick tutorial.
Tests communicate a lot of information, to readers, other developers, and even our future selves. Well-written tests focus on a single unit of behaviour that can be described in a brief sentence, and we can use that sentence as the name of the test.
There’s an easy, pleasant, and reliable way to build software in Go, guided by tests. Let’s find out what it’s like to program with confidence, in the first part of this TDD tutorial series.
Now that generics have come to Go, let's take a look at the new syntax for type parameters. We’ll find out why we need type parameters, how we write them, and how we can use them to create generic functions in Go.
Generics what now? This friendly, down-to-earth tutorial series explains how Go’s generic functions and types work, why we need them, and where we can use them.
Let’s talk business—independent business, that is. What’s the cost of being the boss? Some more hard-learned lessons from my own horrible career.
The iterator proposal is a neat way to write “lazy loops”, where we never generate more results than we actually use. Let’s see what that would look like in Go programs.
AES is the modern standard encryption algorithm, but how does it work? Where does it come from? Let’s kick the tyres with a high-level overview of AES internals.
Which is a better choice, Rust or Go? Which language should you choose for your next project, and why? How do the two compare in areas like performance, simplicity, safety, features, scale, and concurrency?
What are the best Go books for 2024? Read my (relatively) unbiased recommendations for the Go books you should absolutely buy and read right now, whether you’re a beginner or expert Gopher.
In the final part of this series on the world of work, we’ll talk about how not to suck at meetings.
In the second part of my tell-all memoir, we find out why I was constitutionally unsuited to employment in a structured environment, or indeed any environment.
In the second part of this series on career skills for software engineers, we’ll look at how to deal with that trickiest of species: human beings.
Dev advocate Zack Proser grilled me lightly about my career, and why I haven’t taken any of my own advice. Read the full interview, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.