Monthly Archives: July 2022

Send error events using defer statements in Go

Leave a reply

Note: In my current job I code in Go, after a long, long time primarily using Java. So I’m still learning Go, through the prism of Java experience. I might write once in a while about it … like this.

Suppose you’ve got a big old function that returns an error if there’s trouble. Commonly, you’d log the error if it comes back.

err := bigOldFunc(input)
if err != nil {
  log.Errorf("Oh no: %v", err)
}

Another option could be to send an event about the error to a collection system. That’s like logging, but the event could store structured details about the context of the call beyond the error string. (Sorry if my indentation isn’t right.)

err := bigOldFunc(input)
if err != nil {
  analytics.SendEvent(analytics.Event{
    Message:    "Oh no",
    Properties: analytics.NewProperties()
      .Set("input", input)
      .Set("error", err.Error()),
    },
  )
}

What if you want the event to include more about what the function was doing at the time? For example, suppose the function was looping through a list, and you’d like the include the current item in the event. You don’t know that by the time the function has returned.

Continue reading →

Tactics for small code reviews: No-effect changes

1 Reply

In this little series of posts, I’ll describe techniques that you, humble coder, can use to make your code reviews smaller. Why do that? Justifications abound, so I’ll just link you to a couple of good articles.

In my own writing, I’ll get into the details of how to accomplish the goal of smaller code reviews. I will use git terminology, but the ideas should apply to any version control system where human review is involved.

I’ll start off with one of my favorite tricks for forming a small code review, which is what I’ll call here a “no-effect” change.

Suppose that you have a set of changes spread across a ton of files. All of the changes are related to one idea (great!), but there are simply a lot of them. Find a small set of files that could be split into their own review and do so, even if merging them doesn’t change program behavior.

Continue reading →