Posts
How Go Channels Work: The Behavior Matrix
A practical guide to Go channels — receive, send, and close behavior across nil, unbuffered, buffered, and closed states
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.
http-echo: a verbose HTTP echo server for debugging anything
A small Go HTTP server that prints every detail of an incoming request — handy for proxies, webhooks, and Kubernetes networking puzzles
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.
httpfileserver: serve a directory over HTTP, the boring way
A tiny Go binary (and scratch Docker image) to expose a directory over HTTP, with optional basic auth and configurable timeouts
Once in a while I need to throw a directory online. Share a build artifact with a colleague, expose a folder of files inside a Kubernetes cluster, mount a release directory behind an internal nginx — the kind of task where a full web server is overkill and python3 -m http.server is too primitive.
That’s the niche httpfileserver fills: a single static Go binary (or a scratch-based Docker image) that serves a directory, with the few quality-of-life features I always end up wanting.
httping-go: ping, but for HTTP endpoints
A tiny Go CLI that hits a URL on a loop and prints status code, response time and size — the HTTP equivalent of ping
When a service starts misbehaving, my first reflex is ping. It tells me almost instantly whether the box is up, whether latency is sane, and whether anything weird is going on at the network layer. The trouble is that for HTTP services, ping answers the wrong question. The host can answer ICMP just fine while the application returns 502s every other second.
httping-go is my Go take on the classic httping idea: a tiny CLI that hits a URL on a loop and prints status code, latency and response size. It’s the tool I reach for when I want a quick, continuous feel for how an HTTP endpoint is behaving.
jwt-cli: encode and decode JWTs without a browser tab
A small Go CLI to encode, decode and inspect JWT tokens with HMAC, RSA and ECDSA signing
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.