Go has superb built-in support for good programming practices, such as test-driven development. In fact, I'm learning a lot about TDD while learning Go from this book: “Learn Go with Tests”.

If you want to test a bunch of similar inputs and outputs, it's handy to run table-driven tests. What you do is list input values and expected output in an array, then loop through all the test cases.

I found this blog post by Lorenzo Peppoloni quite helpful. It gives examples in both Golang and Python for table-driven tests. ⋯

I changed the name of this blog to “a study of bugs”. This makes it easier for me to think of what to write about -- bugs, of course.

In MySQL, you can use a question mark (?) in a prepared statement to stand in for a value.

In the Go code above, dbconn is a connection to a MySQL server. Line 1 defines a prepared statement. And Line 3 queries the table for a row where the name column matches the value of variable name. I assumed the ? in this query would be interpolated with an actual string. I added quotation marks since they are needed around strings in MySQL CLI. ⋯

I've been using a pomodoro app that provides a REST API. Through this API, you can query past pomodoros using parameters such as ended_before and ended_after. The response data also contains started_at and ended_at fields.

The values for these fields all look like this: 2022-01-01T07:18:59.000Z. And they are UTC time strings suffixed with a Z. Correctly so, because it indicates this timestring is UTC.

There are fields named local_started_at and local_ended_at. Although those values are clearly not UTC, they are all suffixed with a Z. This confused me a bit at first. (And it seems quite common for people to suffix Z at the end of a time string, regardless of which timezone that time string actually is.) ⋯

This is how useCallback works.

In the callback defined on line 🙄, the function body increases the count by 1. We set the dependency list to be shallChange. This way, the count will not increase unless shallChange gets a different value.

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Here are a few things I noticed in week 7.

I was creating a React app using create-react-app and ran into this error:

After googling around I saw a workaround by installing v5 locally. ⋯

The more I program, the more I find myself realizing the why of some of the basics.

You can use either a method or a function to sort or reverse a list in Python. One works in-place, meaning the order of items in the original list is changed. The other works on a copy of the list and returns an ordered version of that copy as a new list.

list.sort() and list.reverse() are methods of the list class. They are both verbs, suggesting they take actions on an instance of the list class. And as methods that are internal to a list, they are understandably “allowed” to change the internal order of list items. ⋯

I spent some time last week to get myself more familiar with TypeScript.

Although I'd known the syntax, how to type things (props, components, etc) was at times still confusing. I probably saw more than a bunch of errors thrown at me.

Hopefully I'd love it when I get the hang of it. People on the internet say, all pros and cons considered, it's worth the while.

A few things:

Handling date and time is more complicated than I expected. python-dateutil is quite helpful when you need to parse a datetime string.

I tried updating a field in a MongoDB document using MongoEngine. The value of that field was an embedded document that contained four sub-fields. I intended to change the value of subkey2. But the entire embedded document was overwritten. ⋯

These are the fun I had in week 45, 2021.

I ended up in a situation where I decided to use Djongo to bridge MongoDB and Django.

MongoEngine team made a Django connector. But it does not seem to be actively maintained. So they pointed to Djongo and described it as “promising”. (Spoiler: If something is “promising”, the universe hasn't decided whether to resolve it or reject it.) ⋯

It took me more than a year to finish reading my first Swedish novel Tio över ett, a teenage romance story set in mining town Kiruna. I got this paperback from a shelf at Uppsala University where people leave their used books. You'd most often see conference proceedings and PhD dissertations – dozens of brand new copies at once – left there.

I also bought the audio version from Bokus.com, because you can download DRM-free MP3 files from there.

Once you have the MP3 files, you can practice dictation with them. It's handy to listen to the recordings using a piece of audio software, such as Audacity or Tenacity. ⋯