Guney Can Gokoglu

As it turns out, I am bad at blogging, who knew? (I knew, since like literally one of the first piece of code I wrote everytime I learn a new language/stack is a blog and I have a blog since 2oo3 but I am still hopeful like an idiot everytime I put up a new blog, I will write lots of posts.)

But I think this is a good concept, like yearly themes, setting some tech stacks as key points and some as goals is a good way for me personally to look back and see a good timeline.

I love APIs but client apps suck.

I think first app I break apart from a single full stack monolith to a server side api + client side app was Poltio's social network application in 2015 or 2016.

Back then the idea of having a client app where you can just keep as couple of static files (html, js and css) and host it on a very easy to scale storage buckets like AWS S3 was amazing. Like all good things, we put too much stuff in our client bundles and made everything more complex and worse.

With how things going in client side worlds (eg: nextjs or remix), full stack applications coming back hard and they SHOULD. Like sending a HTML genrated dynamically on the server with minimal css and js required for that route is the best way for web applications.

So after watching nextjs and remix.run re-discover basic http and web concepts 20+ years later for the last couple of years, I am completely giving up and removing react, vue and their hormonal fullstack counterparts from my stack.

We (at Poltio) still have 2 nextjs applications running which I am in the process of replacing with a Laravel + Livewire application and our widgets still powered by Remix.run which will be harder to replace but not impossible.

So no more next/remix for me, thanks for all the fish.

Small Services

I love devops, kubernetes and writing isolated services. But I don't like to overcomplicate things to the point where the small teams that I work with have more trouble understanding what the heck is going on. But since I use kubernetes like everywhere thesedays, creating and deploying a new service internally or externally is not a big deal.

For those kind of services my language of choice is Go. I was planning on focusing more on Rust in 2023 but it didn't pan out like I hoped. I really love the desicions Go is making and I have more fun writing Go. Since the memory advantages that Rust has over Go doesn't impact any code I wrote, I get to stick with what I enjoy <3

Lua <3

I freaking LOVE lua. I started with it with neovim config but currently if I have 2 alternatives for an app, one uses lua for config/scriptting and other uses anything else (yaml/toml/etc), I choose the lua one. I love lua.

Hammerspoon Wezterm Neovim

LLMs and Transformers are NFTs in 2024

I love machine learning and ai, always have. But like the current bubble we are in where everybody talking about AI and using AI and worshipping AI is not a good place for AI. It gives crypto/nft vibes by people who have no idea about the actual technology but trying to ride the wave.

I am wishing the trend dies down a bit so people who are working on building and training the llm models can go back to building useful stuff.

So Ben Awad on Youtube makes a video every year to list out the technologies he is interested in learning and also how his past year went. You can see his last video from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCCaYEG5KeA

This makes so much sense. As a developer we see new and shiny new technologies everywhere and as moths to light, we are drawn to them. But time is finite unlike the amount of shiny new stacks that comes out every year :) By writing couple of them down I think I can anchor myself down and keep track better.

This will be a good record after couple of years as well, so here it goes;

NeoVim

I think the best thing happened to me in 2022 is NeoVim. As a vim user for almost 2 decades, neovim is the most I love using my editor. LSP is amazing, Lua is amazing. Overall it's just super duper enjoyable for me to use my editor.

Laravel

Laravel is my go to framework for testing ideas. It has pretty much everything to make an MVP for a web app or api. It works well, scales well and I feel very comfortable using it. The most important part about using Laravel is I can focus on what I am building instead of how I am building it. And I will planning on keeping it in my toolbelt in 2023 as well.

Tailwind

Tailwind is kind of the best thing that I invested in 2022 and I can't be more happier about it. As a backend developer, I never had fun when I had to write CSS. But with tailwind it's weirdly satisfying.

I am buying everything that the creators releasae like the tailwindui which makes everything 10x easier.

NextJS

In 2022 I didn't like NextJS that much. For Poltio frontend stuff, we decided to use Remix. That is not going well. Nothing specificially bad about remix but if it's not a hobby project, you want your framework to have best practices, documentation and examples for every case and that is not the case for remix since it's so new.

In 2023 I am planning on investing on NextJS more since it is more mature ecosystem.

Github Actions

I was using Github Actions for some pipelines but most of the mission critical pipelines were still on Google Cloud Build and AWS CodeDeploy and CodeBuild. In 2023 I am planning on moving ALL of my pipelines to Github Actions and packaging up my random JavaScript code containing yaml files as official action packages. I think pipelines should be more connected to Pull Requests and github actions fits so well.

Kubernetes

In 2020 while we were migrating to Google Cloud from AWS for Poltio, I migrated pretty much all of our workloads to kuberenetes. 2 years later, I can't love kubernetes more. It makes so much sense, it works pretty much how you expect all of the time and Google Cloud is making working with k8s so easy.

This year I am planning on investing on more and improving our reporting and logging stacks more.

Playwright

I have a pretty good relationship with k6.io and stress/load tests. This year I am planning on learning to use e2e better to improve our CI pipelines and among all the options playwright seems most interesting.

Cassandra

TBH, I was planning to actively use Cassandra almost 4 years now :) But Redis + a traditional DB like MySQL or PostgreSQL was still pretty good for me so I am hoping this year I will have a chance to use Cassandra since we are starting to play with bigger but more temporary data sets that has different schemas.

Echo

Although the last 3 services I wrote used Gin, Echo is still my go to framework for creating Go microservices. If the service has a single file I just can't bring myself to use a framework but if we have more files, I will pick Echo everytime and plan on using it on 2 new services this year.

TypeScript

Since I don't get to write that much JS code on day to day basis, I wasn't succesful on convincing my team mates to switch to TS in 2022 but we are finally working on the PR to move our new remix stack to typescript and I am very hopeful that 2023 will be the year of TS for our frontend stack.

Rust

During 2022 most of my most used Gnome applications switched to Rust as their backend. I was planning on investing more time and learning to use Rust more efficiently but after switching back to macos since the 14" macbook pro is simply the best hardware that kind of took a back seat. Hopefully in 2023 I can invent a reason to dive back in :)

SwiftUI

I was planning on developing a duo finder for LoL to teach myself SwiftUI. I made couple of example apps locally with SwiftUI, in 2023 I am planning on finishing and releasing the app in app store just to keep my muscle memory fresh since my last mobile project was back in 2019 :/

I love vim. It gives me the same development environment via SSH even I am working on my iPad or a computer that I don't normally use. But VSCode is good too, it can do pretty much anything that any other IDE does and it does it fast. VSCode is also very popular which makes the extension space really good. You can pretty much find any extension or theme that you want or need. But I can't use it nor any other non-terminal editor thanks to Tmux. I need at least 3-4 panes open next to my editor and I need this setup replicated for all the projects I am currently working. Considering that I have like 9 repos only on Poltio that I actively work on (thanks to microservices) VSCode and any other viable editor is not as productive as for me as working with Vim+Tmux.

And even tho I love trying new things and used all popular editors and IDEs, my main editor of choice remained Vim for the last 15+ years. And I switched to Neovim couple of years ago but I was still using my old config/plugins written in Vimscript. Vimscript is not very developer friendly and I never was too into learning it. I copied and pasted lots of lines in vimscript as any good developer but never learn to actually use it.

I was already hearing gospels for Lua from the nvim and redis communities and I was curious, since using an actual mature programming language as your config will bring lots of flexibility.

So, I did end up writing my new nvim config completely with Lua and used plugins that were mostly written in Lua instead of using old vimscript versions.

I am so happy with the end result, it became a new fresh wind and boosted my productivity. (not because it's so much faster or better then my previous setup but because it's new and shiny :) )

Here is the relevant PR for my dotfiles: https://github.com/gcg/dotfiles/pull/1 And you can find the most up to date version of my dot files from the same repo.

Notes;

• Neovim From Scratch is amazing. They have a youtube playlist in the readme which was the most helpful for me of understanding how lua config works and the steps I should take.
• LunarVim is amazing. And it's self contained. So you can just get it and run it isolated with it's own binary lvim without it effecting your own nvim setup. So you can experiment without any risks.
• Switching to built in language server (LSP) from CoC is really faster for most of the cases.
• Null-ls.nvim is better then Ale
• Pretty much all plugins written in vimscript will keep working even if you use lua 100%.
• Configuring plugins and settings in Lua is way easier to understand (especially if you don't know vimscript)
• Lua is not OCD about most of the styles so if you are OCD and use a standard writing style, configure something like StyLua (it's eslint / gofmt / prettier / phpcs for lua )

Wow, it has been a while hasn't it? I think the last time I blog was at 2019 about how I am going to start blogging more, which aged perfectly at this point.

Well, instead of actually blogging, from now on, I am planning on starting to share small thoughts, lessons I learn, things I discover and like. This page will be more like a public bookmark engine rather than a personal blog from now on. Hence, I am not gonna move previos blog entries.

I was planning on learning how to use a tool like Hugo or Jekyll for sometime now for Poltio Landing Page Since we are not updating that page often, using React is overkill. But before I start building Poltio landing page with a static site generator, I felt more comfortable of using my personal page as my playground for learning and I picked Hugo because I like Go.

Me switching to a static site generator for this site will bring another benefit, the old server that used to host my blog which was powered by Ghost was a virtual machine that was running an older version of Ubuntu. Since I forget to upgrade that machine for a while, it was impossible to do relaase upgrade on it anymore. Which is exactly I hate this update cycles (rolling release FTW) (i use arch btw). I wish cloud providers offer more distros that uses rolling release. Long story short, with something static like Hugo, I don't need to manage my own hosting and just trust any cdn host to host and maintain my site. I picked Github Pages since I am a huge GH fan <3

Well, don't get your hopes high, if my past blogs were any indication, this will be probably the first and last entry, but if the stars align, I will post about, learning and using lua for nvim, kubernetes and gke, using rust and gtk4 and go probably.