For the relaunch of my personal website, I used the awesome Hugo static website generator, and for a shorter leadtime, extended it with two custom Hugo Shortcodes I use frequently. Automatic Gallery The template I am temporarily using for the launch phase already contains basic gallery support with the primary aim of styling based on Fancybox, but it lacked automatic serving of a directory as a gallery. What I knew was that I wanted to drop my galleries under /static/galleries/{name}, as I heavily prefer the convention-over-configuration maxime.

Given an overall systems architecture or infrastructure which gets the “IoT” box ticket, the will probably be a place where data transfer and size will come into account, for instance if constrained devices are using a potentially unreliable or expensive connection, such as a cellular data connection. For instance, an enbedded monitoring device which serves the purpose of delivering real-time telemetry to the core system of a car manufacturer will quickly come to a point where JSON-Encoding might exceed the computing power required for the actual job.

This is a companion article for my first talk at the Go User Group “Gophers” Aachen about Protocol Buffers and coupling Go services with Java. In a distributed system it is required to go beyond communication by shared memory, and even cross technology borders. This is nothing uncommon, it is more or less standard for a contemporary system to be designed as a distributed, interlinked collection of software modules which are not necessarily implemented in the same technology or even computer architecture.

During the evaluation period of two new projects with an expected lifespan of 10 years, free from any legacy constraints, I recently had to decide on a method to provide data persistency. Starting from scratch in 2015 prompts the architect with quite a lot of interesting solutions, especially because the more and more mature solutions which are not strictly pursuing the Relational Database approach. In this article I will summarize my personal “history” of how I dealt with persistency and which way I am going to choose.