Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

maybe: A command-line tool that succeeds sometimes

2025-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

I just released version 1.0.0 of maybe, a command-line utility that succeeds some of the time. It is written in Go and is not very many lines of code, but I do hope that it can be useful for people.

Some History

I recently got a Korg Volca Drums drum synthesizer. It has a sequencer that allows you to program the probability of a particular instrument playing on a particular step, and I thought that was a really cool feature. This inspired me to think about cron jobs that happen only some of the time. Maybe the cron job would run, maybe it wouldn’t.

This inspired me to write maybe, a command-line utility that returns either success or failure, based on flags you pass it. It defaults to succeeding 50 percent of the time, but you can change that. This means you could make a cron job like this, which would run do-something.sh 40 percent of the time.

# At midnight every Sunday, do something sometimes.
0 0 * * 0     maybe -chance 40 && do-something.sh

The Future of maybe

I don’t think I will stop at version 1.0.0. I have already considered what may happen to maybe in the future. Here are some things that I would like to do:

Add cryptographically secure randomness. There is no reason to use Go’s default random library. Let us try to be as random as possible.
More granularity to the randomness. What if you want to run something 40.5 percent of the time?
Experiment with GitHub actions, such as building binaries for every operating system that maybe should support.

As you can see, the opportunities for improvement are many. And maybe (ha ha!) you will see improvements soon!

Perhaps this is a good time to visit maybe on GitHub and star the repo so others can find it?

Migrating from WordPress to Jekyll

2022-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Since launching this site in 2014, it has run on WordPress. I have always wanted to move the site to another blogging platform, especially since I wasn’t really taking advantage of all of the WordPress features.

I kept running WordPress for years for two reasons.

First, I needed to show off my WordPress skills to attract clients. Second, I thought it would be difficult to migrate away from WordPress. Once I got some experience with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, I knew I wanted to eventually move to that platform.

I followed these simple instructions by Supun Kavinda and used a plugin to export all of my content from WordPress to Jekyll.

The process only took about an hour to get everything set up.

I then spent hours tweaking everything until it looked good. Probably too many hours.

Why migrate to Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator, and pages and posts are all generated with easy Markdown. This makes it easy to keep the layout simple and easy to do things like share source code.

Here is some simple Go code just to show you how it looks.

func main() {
  	fmt.Println("Welcome to the playground!")
	fmt.Println("The time is", time.Now())
}

GitHub Pages makes it easy to use source control to track changes to your website. I have been loving this function on other websites I maintain. As an added bonus, I was tired of the WordPress theme I had been using, and didn’t relish the thought of finding a new one.

What about missing features?

Indeed, I will need to figure out how to handle all of the little broken things in all of my old posts going back to 2014. Here are some features I will miss:

Automatically embedded Tweets.
Automatic sharing of new posts to Twitter and LinkedIn.
Password-protected web pages.

Also, my Disqus account doesn’t seem to be loading correctly. Will I fix that? Who knows! In the meantime, if you want to respond to this, you can find me on Twitter.

Please Use Version Control

2015-04-09T03:07:44+00:00

Stack Overflow released their 2015 Developer Survey this week, and it has some interesting results. There are plenty of articles being written about their findings, so I’m only going to focus on one of them: version control.

9.3% of Respondents Don't Use Version Control

StackOverflow says that almost 10% of developers still aren’t using version control. This is terrible. If you happen to be one of the developers who hasn’t adopted version control yet, make it your next priority!

Version control, also known as source control or revision control, is vital to best programming practices. It provides an incremental backup along with comments and notes on changes that have been made. It provides a view of changes and all kinds of handy features, such as handling conflicts between changes, release tagging, code branches, and more. If you aren’t sure what version control is, check out Ilya Olevsky’s post, “Why Version Control is Critical to Your Success,” and then come back here.

Essential to Collaboration and Continuity

If you are looking to hire a freelance developer, make sure you hire one that uses version control. It is essential to maintaining a healthy history of code releases, project updates, and bug fixes. What if you only need to use your freelancer every once in a while? What if you decide to add more developers, or change developers all together? Without version control, this becomes a nightmare.

A client recently brought me a project that had been built by another developer a couple of years ago. They wanted to move their web application from one host to another. However, there was a lot that needed to be cleaned up before the move could happen, including some outdated PHP code and odd database settings. In the project’s main directory, there was a mess of old, unused source code files. Just the index.php file had multiple versions:

index2.php
index3.php
indexold.php
index.php_old
index.php_bak

In all, there were 598 unused files that were unnecessary backups of old, broken code. This type of mess is easily avoided with version control. Please stay sane, keep your customers happy, and your source code easy to navigate. Use version control.

Getting Started with Version Control

If you’ve decided to make the right move and start using version control, you will see that there are many to choose from. However, if you’re just going to learn one, you should start with Git. As you can see from the survey, it is the most widely used. The best place to start is probably in the free e-book offered by the Git development team. Click here to get started.

If You're Doing It, Thank You

The first time I encountered a team that wasn’t using version control, I was shocked. The second time, I sighed in exasperation. Now, I am thankful that over 90% of developers are using it, and I look forward to the day that every project I join comes with a git log command. If you are using version control, I hope you spread the word and make sure that your fellow programmers are doing it, too. Save the rest of us some pain!

As a bonus, here’s my favorite git log command. Add it to your aliases.

git log --oneline --graph --all --decorate

The featured image for this post is a pile of logs, to remind you that logs are important, and a vital part of version control.

Prime Number Service on Google App Engine

2015-02-20T22:37:41+00:00

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve decided to learn the Go programming language. I’ve also been very interested in Google App Engine, which lets you deploy applications to the cloud from a development sandbox. It’s like magic for web and mobile applications!

Since I’m so fond of prime numbers, I thought I’d build a web service for calculating them. It does some other fun stuff, too, like figuring out if a number is happy. It also caches primes in the Google Cloud Datastore with some minimal statistics. If you’d like to see the source code for the prime number service, it’s available on GitHub.

The next thing I did was write the simplest of all WordPress plugins to query the service and return the latest prime number in the sequence. This all happens in a post using the [[nextprime]] shortcode. ((Including this information has the side-effect of revealing how much traffic this page gets.))

[nextprime]

You can also visit the app itself and read about querying the service to get prime numbers for your own web page!

Learning Go and writing for the Google App Engine has been really fun. I’m ready for a new challenge! If you have a web application in mind, contact me and let’s figure out how to build it!

Small Team Software Change Management

2014-12-18T01:45:51+00:00

Until October, I’d been using a paid GitHub account to manage source code changes and issue tracking for private projects. GitHub is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product providing a web-based interface for source control management and various project tracking tasks. Some people love it and some aren’t fond of it.

My software development clients are typically small companies wanting fairly simple web applications. They hire me because having a developer on staff doesn’t fit into their budget or business plan. They don’t usually care what the source code for their project looks like, but they do care about tracking issues.

Because of the scope of these applications, it’s rare that I work with other programmers. This meant that I wasn’t using any of the special features of GitHub for private code repositories, so in October I cancelled my subscription.

My private repositories are now self-hosted, and I browse them using GitList, which bills itself as “an elegant and modern git repository viewer.” It looks nice, and I’ve got no complaints. For issue tracking, I use Freshbooks, a SaaS accounting system. With Freshbooks, I can not only keep track of bug reports and issues, but I can record time spent on bug reports, feature creep, and other client-related issues.

GitList and Freshbooks isn’t a perfect solution. At some point, I will be working with another developer, and we will need a way to track bugs and issues internally. When that happens, I plan to deploy Gitolite and find some new issue-tracking solution.

By the way, another reason I stopped using paid GitHub features is because they’ve already made plenty of money, and I’m not sure they’re doing the right things with all of that money.

I’m curious about what others are using. How does your incredibly small team track code changes and issues? Are all of your software issues internal, or are you developing for clients? I’d love to hear some ideas.