English - Benji Vesterby (Author) Feed

Introduction to Application Security (AppSec)

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 07:00:00 -0500

Cybersecurity (a.k.a. Information Security) is an overly generalized term for a field securing digital infrastructure, applications, or services. The goal of a cybersecurity program is to identify, categorize, and prioritize risk within an organization. These risks are then remediated in an effort to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack by a bad actor .

Application Security is a sub-category of cybersecurity that focuses on identifying and correcting insecure code or vulnerabilities in software developed within an organization. Unlike applications purchased through vendors or open source software, the security of a custom application is the responsibility of the creator.

Intro to Generics in Go: Type Parameters, Type Inference and Constraints

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 21:10:00 -0500

Generic programming for statically typed languages is a tool for building maintainable software. Generics have a lot of advantages and can create infinitely reusable code, they do however, have a history of being overused and misunderstood leading to anti-patterns¹. Due to the regularity of misuse the Go team has been reluctant to add generics to the language.

Beginning in February 2022, Go will introduce generics support in its 1.18 release². The Go team spent many years researching and experimenting with different implementations of generics and their implications for Go. The Go team believes they have found an implementation that is both effective and, more importantly, maintains the simplicity of the language.³

An Overview of Generic Programming: Writing Code with Arbitrary Types

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 20:10:00 -0500

Generic Programming is a specialized form of programming in some languages (primarily statically typed languages) where code is written to process objects of any arbitrary type. The distinction between generic programming and normal programming is when writing generic code the “type” (often denoted T) of the data is not explicitly stated. The generic programming paradigm is challenging to master because it requires a high level of abstraction (ignoring the type of data in its entirety).

Building a Go Version Manager (GVM)

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 19:55:00 -0500

I have been using Go since early 2017 and have only grown to love the language and the community more and more over time. There is one thing I have always found frustrating about Go, however, which is the very manual process of installing a new version.

Beginning Concurrency Patterns

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500

In this post I will cover some best practices for building concurrent applications in Go using basic concurrency patterns and native primitives. The patterns themselves are applicable to any language, but for these examples we will use Go.

Clone the repository for this post to follow along

1git clone https://github.com/benjivesterby/may2021-triangle-meetup.git

Pipeline Pattern

A pipeline pattern¹ ² consists of a number of stages that are connected by a series of channels. The first stage is the source of the data, the last stage is the sink of the data. A good example of this would be a data pipeline where the first step mines the data, the subsequent steps cleans the data, and the final step stores the sanitized data in a database.

Go Native Concurrency Primitives & Best Practices

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500

The Go programming language was created with concurrency as a first class citizen. It is a language that allows you to write programs that are highly parallel with ease by abstracting away the details of parallelism behind concurrency primitives¹ within the language.

Parallelism and Concurrency; What's the Difference?

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500

Parallelism in software is the execution of instructions simultaneously. Each programming language either implements their own libraries, or provide native support as part of the language, like Go. Parallelism allows software engineers to side-step the physical limitations of the hardware by executing tasks in parallel on multiple processors.¹

Go 1.16 Release Overview

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 17:28:00 -0500

Go 1.16 – embed | io/fs | retract | Apple M1 support

Click Here to View the Presentation Slides

It's a 2021 PI (π) Day Special! Try Your Very Own Monte Carlo PI (π) Simulation!

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 09:07:00 -0500

So, if you have read my intro post when I started this blog like forever ago (Feb 7, 2021 to be exact), then you know that I’m super excited about a project called Atomizer . I’ve been slowly stringing you (my readers) along for the last few posts to build up some background so that I can reference it when I start talking about MPDC (Massively Parallel Distributed Computing).

Understanding Monolithic Architectures: Benefits, Scaling, and Pain Points

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:00:00 -0500

So, we discussed different ways to scale your application . Now, let’s look at monolithic architectures and applications.

A monolithic application is one in which all of the functions of the application are part of the same artifact / application. This does not mean that the application itself is tightly coupled , but that the application generally runs as a whole on the same system.¹

How to Scale Your Application Architecture: Vertical vs. Horizontal

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 06:00:00 -0500

Scaling can be a weighty subject…

It’s important to keep your AWS bill at a healthy weight.

You should probably consider reducing your mass-ive infrastructure. (yeah yeah, mass isn’t weight, I get it… geez)

Wow… How many scale puns can this guy come up with?

“A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.” ― Oscar Levant

A Quick Recap of Single-Core vs Multi-Core Processing

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 18:11:00 -0500

Wow, did this guy run out of material already? I thought he was going to talk about AI, cybersecurity, and distributed computing. I had such high hopes.

I’m going to run through a quick recap of the evolution from single- to multi-core processing. This recap will likely be review for some of you, but the concepts here are going to be very important when we talk about mpdc .

Applied Artificial Intelligence & Cybersecurity Research; What Could Be Better?

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 10:36:07 -0500

Most of you are likely going to ask: are you seriously staring a blog in 2021? Surely, being in tech, you know there are new social platforms that are less boring, right? Absolutely, I plan on making full use of those, too. This way, though, you’re able to copy and paste my code, just like you do with stack overflow.