In Linux, system calls (syscalls) are at the heart of everything. They are the primary interface through which an application interacts with the kernel. Therefore, it is vital that they are fast. And especially in a post-Spectre/Meltdown world, this is all the more important. A major chunk of the syscalls deal with I/O, because that’s what most applications do. For network I/O, we’ve had the epoll family of syscalls which have provided us with reasonably fast performance.
Read MoreOn Monday, March 16, 2020, I had the privilege to (virtually) join Shota Gvinepadze and his students at the Free University of Tbilisi and speak about “Advanced Git @ Mattermost” for a portion of their class time. The following are my speaking notes from the session, slightly modified from the original slides for this format. Keep in mind that the command line examples are illustrative of my workflow, and not meant to be run in isolation.
Read MoreIn person, you can easily tell someone’s mood based on their body language and how they speak, but that’s much more difficult with text alone. Emojis are a great way to add tone to a piece of text and also help make text-based conversation feel more casual, relaxed, and fun. Thanks to emojis, we can chat with much more real emotion than you might get by being careful about your word choice or by including just the right number of exclamation marks and periods at the end of a sentence.
Read MoreMaintaining success in a large open-source project is one of the key objectives of Mattermost. We have hundreds of contributors and we want to create a project that could serve as a model in the Go community. Having said that, following idiomatic Go principles is the thing that we care most about while maintaining our code consistency. For this specific task, we utilized go vet and with this blog post, I would like to explain how we pushed the limits of this tool by extending it.
Read MoreWelcome! This is the second part of our AST blog post series, expanding on the subject of utilizing Go AST libraries to automate and improve your workflow. In this post I’ll discuss a rather common problem that comes up while working with Go code and the way we’ve solved it by sprinkling a little bit of AST magic dust. Let’s dive in. Problem: A struct with no interface Let’s say you are working on a large code base that was not built with interfaces in mind, meaning, there are structs and methods attached to those structs, but there is no interface describing it.
Read MoreOne of the most important parts of the Mattermost source code is the one responsible for accessing the Mattermost database - the store. Every single database access is handled by the store, so we needed to find a way to extend its functionality while introducing as little complexity as possible. This is the reason behind the current layered approach using struct embedding. Our store is responsible for storing and retrieving data, and sometimes we need to add functionality that is not strictly related to the database queries, for example, cache data or add instrumentation.
Read MoreAt Mattermost, we have traditionally relied on the trusty go vet and gofmt checks for our CI runs. Although it works well, there are a lot of other powerful linters out there which we’re potentially missing out on. Speaking of linters, the first name that inevitably comes up is staticcheck. It’s a powerful metalinter with a whole slew of checks. But simply running staticcheck is not sufficient, because it misses out on other linters which perform a single task, but nevertheless are very powerful.
Read MoreWith the upgrade to React Native 61 came the prospect of substantially improving performance of our Android app. How? Through the use of Hermes, Facebook’s new JavaScript engine. To say that we were excited is an understatement. And with that excitement came curiosity: how is this new JavaScript engine achieving performance boosts? Let’s first chat a bit about JS engines in general. How does your JavaScript code eventually get executed by the CPU on the machine?
Read MoreI recently joined Mattermost as a Remote Software Engineer and while I’ve worked in remote environments before, I was really surprised at how amazing this company is to work with. During my onboarding I discovered that they have really developed a culture built around being remote; one that allowed for me to feel as part of a larger team and always engaged, rather than separated from my peers and working alone.
Read MoreIt wasn’t my first time flying. It also wasn’t the first time I had arrived at the airport early enough to require multiple cups of coffee. As I sat at my gate, however, I did find myself wondering for the first time: had I ever heard the words “Lambda,” “stateful set", and “yaml” while waiting to board? You see, a bunch of us were coming from all over to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019.
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