Posts

Channels are Go’s primary tool for coordinating goroutines, but their behavior changes drastically depending on their state. A channel can be nil, unbuffered, buffered, or closed — and the same operation (send, receive, close) does something different in each case. Getting this matrix wrong is how deadlocks and panics happen.

Every few months I find myself stuck on the same kind of question: what exactly is hitting my service? A reverse proxy is mangling a header, a Kubernetes ingress is rewriting a path, a webhook provider is sending a body in some shape I didn’t expect. The fastest way to answer is to point the traffic at something that will tell me, in painful detail, what arrived.

That’s why I wrote http-echo: a tiny Go server that responds to any HTTP request by dumping a structured, human-readable report of everything it saw.

Every time I needed to inspect a JWT, I ended up doing the same thing: paste it into a website I half-trust, squint at the payload, then close the tab feeling vaguely guilty. I wanted a local tool, scriptable, that could both decode tokens and mint them for testing. So I wrote jwt-cli.

A surprising amount of debugging boils down to “let me check the database.” Schema lookups, sample row counts, “is this index actually being used,” EXPLAIN plans. None of that is hard to do in psql, but pulling Claude Code into the loop means copy-pasting schemas and query results back and forth, which gets old.

postgresql-mcp is an MCP server that gives Claude Code direct, read-only access to PostgreSQL. Claude does the inspection, you keep the conversation flowing.

I maintain a Go library for the Perplexity API (perplexity-go). Once it existed, it was almost a sin not to wrap it in a CLI. So pplx is what I reach for when I want a cited, web-aware answer from the shell — and now also a Model Context Protocol server I plug into Claude Code.