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I admit I had not paid much attention to Netlify earlier. It sort of seemed like yet another web performance related startup.

But on reading Fatih’s article on hosting Hugo on Netlify, it piqued my interest. A CDN/hosting service which puts your content in caches all around the world, and triggers Hugo (and bunch of other common scripts) on Github commits? And all this for free? Sounds too good to be true, and memories of Posterous floated in my mind.

But again, the best part of using static blogging software like Hugo, is that there is so less to lose from trying out a new hosting option - no databases to setup, no old content to migrate.

And so i decided to try it out as well. And it turned out to be blindingly simple! Netlify turned out to be awesome!

Here are all the stuff I needed to do to move my Hugo hosting from my shared hosting account at Dreamhost to Netlify.

Soon after I reviewed GoLand, I discovered VS Code - a general purpose editor with superlative support for Go. And I have been impressed enough to stay.

As I understand Go more, some of the concepts tend to make my head hurt. Sometimes, innocent examples in various tutorials hide such deep concepts, that it takes a while for me to decode it all.

Here is an example. In various tutorials, pauses are made using time.Sleep().

The first time I saw an example like the following, it made me stop in my tracks.

package main

import (
	"time"
)

func main() {
	time.Sleep(100 * time.Millisecond)
}

Seems like Jetbrains has finally ditched that weird name for their Go IDE and changed it to a more palatable, but not really very inventive version (come on, I think PyCharm is a pretty nice name for a Python editor). Gogland is now GoLand!

I have been using Hugo as a static website generator for a while. I love the speed, coming from its Go origins. I love a static website generator for the peace-of-mind it gives me (No did I forget to update my XXX blog software after that bug came out? ).

But of course, it is not all peachy.

When the sun is directly overhead in Hawaii, it looks like a bad video game render

The sun is exactly overhead twice a year in Lahaina, Hawaii, once in May and once in July. Poles don’t cast shadows, giving the urban landscape an eerie appearance. Hawaii is the only state in the US where the sun’s rays are perpendicular to the surface of Earth. It’s called a subsolar point.

Via Boingboing

How to have shared state between different instance of a class without a singleton pattern.

The ‘Singleton’ DP is all about ensuring that just one instance of a certain class is ever created. It has a catchy name and is thus enormously popular, but it’s NOT a good idea – it displays different sorts of problems in different object-models. What we should really WANT, typically, is to let as many instances be created as necessary, BUT all with shared state. Who cares about identity – it’s state (and behavior) we care about!

By Alex Martelli at Singleton? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Singleton: The Borg Design Pattern.

I lost an hour of my life today trying to figure out why Sphinx would not document a class inside a module specified by :automodule:.

I learnt two things today.

This might be a very esoteric topic for most people, but since I could not find information about this anywhere, I decided to document this in a post.

Here is the problem. I use Jira at work, and today, I needed to close a bunch of tickets based on a search result. Now, searching or doing batch operations is simple enough from the browser, but a small detail made the exercise impossible via the web UI.

The first 5km of a 100km cycle only superhighway has opened to public in Germany. When complete, the route will connect 10 western cities including Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamm, and four universities. Martin Toennes of regional development group RVR says almost two million people live within 1.2 miles of the bicycle highway and will be able to use sections of it for their daily commutes. With the rise in popularity of electric bicycles to help with undulating terrain, RVR says the bike way, which utilizes mostly abandoned railroad tracks in the Ruhr Valley, could replace up to 50,000 motor vehicles during daily commuting hours.