I was hacking on a personal project over the weekend that I’m deploying using Google’s Container-Optimized OS. Container-Optimized OS is quite convenient for hosting small services that don’t quite fit a web request/response workload: it is (mostly) stateless, it auto-updates, it has systemd, and (as the name implies) it runs Docker containers. It is a nice fit for one-process programming.

For debugging, I want to SSH directly into the VM instance. Especially after recently learning from a coworker how easy it is for blackhats to search the public internet for known vulnerabilities, I don’t want to leave an SSH port open continuously. Even with regular security updates, I’d rather avoid the attack surface. In the past, I would modify my Google Cloud project’s firewall temporarily to allow SSH traffic while debugging and then (hopefully) remove the SSH traffic rule after I finished. This has been cumbersome, but there hasn’t been another solution that’s quite as simple.

Enter Tailscale! Tailscale creates a peer-to-peer Virtual Private Network (VPN) with very little fuss. While Container-Optimized OS is mostly designed for running containers, I found I can run the Tailscale static binary with a little kludging.

In the two months since I published gg 1.0, a project to reduce the friction in working with Git, I’ve been working to make it more accessible and easier to install. To this end, I’ve made three big improvements:

• A standalone Go library, gg-scm.io/pkg/git, allows any Go program to interact with Git repositories. (I may end up writing another blog post just about this — stay tuned!)
• Windows support, complete with MSI installer.
• An APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu users.

If you’re interested in trying out gg, it’s never been easier: see the instructions at gg-scm.io. Read on if you’re interested in how to package a Go program for Windows and Linux.

Today, I released a small library called postgrestest. It spins up an ephemeral PostgreSQL database in Go. I’ve found it quite useful for writing tests that use PostgreSQL while keeping the test hermetic and reasonably fast. In my benchmarks, starting a server takes roughly 650 milliseconds and creating a database takes roughly 20 milliseconds — a 70% improvement and 90% improvement, respectively, over a postgres Docker container in the default configuration.

You can install it with:

go get zombiezen.com/go/postgrestest

I’m proud to announce the first stable release of gg, my alternative Git command-line interface! This has been a release over two years in the making: I’ve battle-tested gg across many different workflows and projects. It’s saved me tons of time every day, and I hope it can save time for others too. Download the latest release and try it out for yourself!

I’m excited to announce that I am joining the engineering team at YourBase! YourBase’s flagship product is a build system that greatly improves the speed of software development with very little configuration. It brings me back to what I’m passionate about: improving how people work by making software simpler. It’s still early days, but I’m excited by the enthusiasm and the respectful, remote-first culture I’ve found at YourBase. I can’t wait to see what we build together!