Blog / Code Review

Reviewing an open-source project

January 22, 2024

Concerns about global state, embedded configuration, and documentation.

Oops! I went on a vacation last week. But so did my deployment pipeline. Which means that the emails I had queued up to send to you didn’t go through. So this week enjoy what I wrote for last week. And I hope you enjoyed a short vacation from me in your inbox, too.

I just published a new video on my Boldly Go YouTube channel. While the code is related to Go, the concepts I discuss (avoiding global state, documenting behavior, etc) should be applicable to any language. So I hope you’ll enjoy my review of the open-source ChessImager library.

Share this

Direct to your inbox, daily. I respect your privacy .

Unsure? Browse the archive .

Related Content

Go Code Roast: Secret Hitler Game

Watch as I review a simple game, writte in Go, and explain what I like, what I don't like, and how the author could improve his chances of landing a job by showing off this code.

Go Code Roast #2: readability.js port

In this video, I roast a port of a Mozilla Javascript library, readability.js to Go.

On Go's verbose error handling

I’m taking a break from the Go spec for a day, to talk about some code I just found in a codebase I’m working on, which I think says some interesting things about the argument that Go’s error handling is too verbose. When I shared this code on a Slack community, someone asked for an email-lengthed explanation, so here it is! Without further ado, here’s the code I ran across (edited slightly to be more general):