Lessons learned from the First Go Challenge. The winning entries were Luke Champine and Jeremy Jay. Runner up was Doug Cichon.

• Simplify by using methods, interfaces and composition.
  • Luke created a Decoder type (which sounds more like an interface) which was a wrapper around an io.Reader. That enabled him to create a composition such as err = NewDecoder(file).Decode(p). I find that to be very elegant.
  • Jeremy implemented a read method for both the Pattern type and the Track types. I like Jeremy's method better because it adds extenisbility if the read method had to be exported.
• If I implemented this again, I would implement both read and decode methods on Pattern and Track types. Reader and Decoder are common interfaces in Go and it wouldn't take much to make Pattern and Track conform to those interfaces.
• An os.File is an io.Reader. This should have been obvious.
• binary.Read requires fields to be exported, but you can define structs with exportable fields within a function, in which the structs themselves are still essentially private to the package (see Luke's solution in the readHeader and readTrack methods).

See also this critique. I made a lot of these mistakes and it almost seems like several of the criticisms were pointed directly at my code!

Response to "Room 219 Revisted"

From a previous post here, I found that Melanie Plesh has responded to me. I am moved.

I posted a comment to this six-month-old blog post:

"I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to you... thanks for responding.

I started my own blog and then quit, going back to web forums instead. I'm glad to hear the school has reopened, even if for limited times per day.

Being at that school and reading your blog have really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Thank very much for being there and being an inspiration for kids. I'm 37 now, with my own kids in school, but I still remember most of my teachers and how big an influence on my life they were."

If you could read her blog and not be moved, then nothing can move you. If you could have seen the condition of that neighborhood when I was there, where the damage before the storm was still very apparent, and still not be moved, then you are inhuman indeed.

They Have Their Own Thoughts: room 219 revisited

I was searching through my Katrina pictures on my laptop, and I decided to Google "frederick douglass high school new orleans oregon national guard" and I found this blog post apparently by a teacher at the school where we stayed when I was there:
They Have Their Own Thoughts: room 219 revisited

I plan on posting some pictures later...