It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve released code to the open web. In fast, the only contributions I’ve done in the last 5 years have been to Chakra and a few other OSS libraries. So, in an attempt to try something new, I recently delved into the world anew.
There have been a few things lately that I wanted to play with:
- Go. I’ve written quite a lot of systems code in Go, but nothing public. I am still terrible at it, but it’s interesting getting things out there.
- Docker. Internally, we’re all Docker but I have yet to actually publish any images.
- Scratch. Still in the docker world, using Go gave me the chance to try a scratch build. No more 500MB images, now I’m getting down to near kilobytes.
- Registries & Actions. And the last docker thing; actually pushing to a registry via automated actions.
- Blogging. I said I’d blog more and so I’m blogging about this!
The app in question is not new, it’s not novel, it’s not even unique in the components it’s using. But it was quick (less than a weekend moring playing around on the sofa), it’s simple (with a minimal surface), and scratches an itch.
GeoIP-lookup is a Go app that uses a local MaxMind City database file, providing a REST API that returns info about an IP address. That’s it.
The app itself is very simple. HTTP, tiny bit of routing, reading databases, and serving responses. GitHub makes it simple to then run an action that generates a new image and pushes this to GHCR. Unfortunately I couldn’t work out what was expected for the signing to work, but that can come later.
The big remaining thing is tests. I’ve got some basic examples in to test the harness, but not much more at the moment. I’ve also learnt how much I miss strict type systems, how much I hate the front-end world, and how good it feels to just get things done and out. Perfect is the enemy of done.
Anyway, it’s live and feels good.
