Pete Davison [pd93]

Japan has been on my list of places to visit for years, but we always found something more important to spend our money on or found a reason to push it back a year. Well this year, my Wife, 3 close friends and I finally put our heads together and planned our first ever trip.

I’m lucky that my family had the means to go on holidays all over Europe when I was young, so I have quite a bit of experience travelling. But even then, I’ve only left the comfort of my home continent to visit the US, South Africa and India. Each of those extra-european trips was a step up in terms culture shock, but I always found a way to settle in. It’s surprising how quickly you can adjust to a country’s customs and traditions if you immerse yourself rather than just observing and this is exactly what I wanted from our trip to Japan.

If you’ve spent much time writing code in Go, you’ve probably come across the functional options pattern. Go doesn’t have named/default arguments and this can sometimes make it difficult to wrap up initialisation logic in a clean way.

The functional options pattern works around this limitation by allowing the caller to pass in a series of functions that modify the object being initialised. This pattern is used commonly in many popular Go libraries such as GRPC and the GCP SDK. However, functional options can be quite a controversial topic in the Go community - Loved by some and hated by others. You’ll notice that the linked packages do not use the typical “function type” approach to functional options. Instead, they use interfaces. This post explains why this is a good idea and how you can use it in your own code.

I’m a reasonably quiet person. The sort of person with a small, but close group of friends. It’s unlikely that you’ll find me shouting loudly across a room or posting regularly on social media. However, I have a deep-rooted passion for science and technology and a love of sharing it with others. If you engage with me in a conversation about anything from your favourite keyboard layout to what happens as you fall into a black hole, we’re going to get along just fine.

Among a small group of friends, it’s not always easy to find an audience for every niche thing I care about. So that’s what this is for. My half-hearted attempt at a blog. Likely to be rarely updated, with plenty of grammatical mistakes and of little use to anyone, but just a place for me to ramble about the things that interest me - and maybe you.

Task has always had variables, but even though you were able to define them using different YAML types, they would always be converted to strings by Task. This limited users to string manipulation and encouraged messy workarounds for simple problems. Starting from v3.37.0, this is no longer the case! Task now supports most variable types, including booleans, integers, floats and arrays!

Lately, Task has been growing extremely quickly and I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the future of the project and how we continue to evolve and grow. I’m not much of a writer, but I think one of the things we could do better is to communicate these kinds of thoughts to the community. So, with that in mind, this is the first (hopefully of many) blog posts talking about Task and what we’re up to.