👋 Hi, I’m Tom.
This is a personal blog where I (infrequently) write about technology and other topics of interest to me. I currently work at Royal Navy DNA. Before that I was a Lead Software Engineer at Simpplr, Inc.
Automated Ticket Alerts in Go
Getting hold of resale tickets can be challenging due to high demand and rapid transactions. To tackle this, I’ve built an automated solution that scrapes ticket websites and sends you SMS alerts when resale tickets become available. This was a learning exercise in concurrency in Go: goroutines, channels, wait groups etc. Lets walk through the implementation details. Find the related source code here: https://github.com/m7kvqbe1/go-ticket-polling How the Solution Works Polling and Scraping: The script uses the colly web scraping library to poll ticket websites and search for the availability of resale tickets at defined intervals....
Unix Sockets and Protobuf in Go
Recently, I had a play around with Unix Sockets and Protobuf with Go. Here’s a brief overview of some of the things I learned. Find the related source code here: https://github.com/m7kvqbe1/unix-sockets-play Unix Sockets: Inter-Process Communication Unix Sockets offer a method for inter-process communication (IPC) on the same machine. It’s faster and leaner than leveraging a network protocol like TCP. They’re straightforward to set up in Go: // Server setup listener, _ := net....