colby.gg

Welcome to where I document some of the things I’ve done. This is a collection of references for myself. Mostly things that were annoying to figure out and deserve a doc, or things I find myself writing up frequently in other contexts. It’s a lot easier to link directly to a detailed explanation than to write a thousand code review comments.

Common Go Footguns: Appending to slices #2 Jan 18, 2026 - 5 min read

This post is a followup to Common Go Footguns: Appending to slices, where I demonstrated that appending to a slice can be a surprising source of impactful performance problems. While this post focuses on Go specifics, much of the methodology and thought process involved in this post applies to most performance related work.

We know that pre-allocating our slices is good. But, what if you don’t know how many items you need to append to your slice? What if you’re appending during an expensive O(n³) algorithm? Most engineers I’ve worked with would really resist doing O(n³) work just to know the size of a slice to pre-allocate. It seems quite wasteful. In the past I’ve conceded here.

Refactoring: Preventing a copy-pasta nightmare Aug 25, 2025 - 9 min read

An example of how I go about extracting generic usable functionality from existing code

Resume as code Aug 19, 2025 - 2 min read

Treating my resume with the same respect I give my code.

Common Go Footguns: Debug Logging Jul 28, 2025 - 3 min read

This is the third post in a series on common go footguns about how debug logging can have surprising performance impacts

Home Assistant: Generating Dashboard Graphs From Sensors Jul 27, 2025 - 3 min read

Generating a dashboard full of graphs from all sensors with given attributes

Home Network TLS Certificates Jan 5, 2025 - 5 min read

How I managed certs for all the things in my home network

Securing simple web services behind caddy with SSO Dec 7, 2024 - 3 min read

Adding SSO with OIDC to simple webapps proxied by Caddy

Common Go Footguns: Appending to slices Aug 25, 2024 - 3 min read

This is the second post in a series on common Go footguns. This post demonstrates the performance impacts of appending a known number of elements to a slice without doing any pre-allocation. This is one of the most common and easily fixed performance issues I see in pull requests on a regular basis.

Common Go Footguns: Interface Nility Aug 24, 2024 - 3 min read

Describing the common footgun of checking an interface for nil

Excluding Generated Mocks From Coverage May 29, 2024 - 1 min read

Some projects make rather heavy use of gomock for testing, and I’ve noticed the command that I had been using to run all tests and generate coverage included the mocks in coverage and brought the numbers down.