Go on Michael-F-Bryan

Run Your Code Generator as a Test

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:05:47 +0800

At some point in a project’s life, somebody runs a code generator. Maybe they point a client generator at an OpenAPI document, or feed a .proto file to protoc, or write a small script that turns a config file into a lookup table. The output is genuinely useful, so it gets committed, and the project’s interfaces improve overnight. Then, being diligent, the author adds a line to the README: “After changing the schema, re-run make generate and commit the result.”

The Accidental Application Runtime

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Imagine you look after the software for a small 3D-print farm: a rack of printers and a Go service running on a box in the corner. The service started life as a dashboard. Somebody wanted to see what each printer was doing without walking over to it, so you wrote a little HTTP server, and because the handlers needed live printer state, the server’s setup code connected to the printers and started a goroutine to poll them. That was completely reasonable.