This is my first post to this blog in a long time, and it is with a fully new engine! zombiezen.com is now entirely hosted by Firebase Hosting and generated by Hugo.

When I first joined Tumblr, it was a very different blogging service than what it has grown into. And especially now that I am working in open source and wanting to post more regularly about more in-depth technical content, I want to have a platform that I can post to and not worry about my content going away. As such, I’ve also copied my content on Medium into this blog.

In this blog post, I’m to do a deep dive into the specific steps and tools that I used to achieve this new mindfulness. If you haven’t read my first blog post about Getting Things Done, you should take a look. I’m not recommending the tools here in any capacity other than from my own personal viewpoint: I’m not getting paid to promote these. I still recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen to understand the theory and reasoning for why to use particular tools, and adapt for your own circumstances.

It was a packed day: all meetings that required my attendance. The only breaks were for breakfast and lunch and a lone 30-minute break between other meetings. I had to meet with my remote manager, my new product manager, one of my team members, and customer liaisons for a new customer we were hoping to work with. On top of that, it was Agile sprint planning day — I had to run the task planning meeting and moderate two design discussion meetings. In between all that, I needed to write up my top accomplishments to my manager for performance review. The previous night, I realized that one of my mentoring meetings tomorrow didn’t have enough time to actually accomplish my mentee’s goals. All the while, a wave of emails and pings were crashing in. How was I going to get this all done?

I originally gave this as a talk at the Seattle Go Meetup on 2017-02-16 (video). The following is a refined version of the talk, not just a verbatim transcript, based on my speaker notes.

This report details an experience I had while writing an RPC system in Go. While Go’s standard I/O libraries make a great many things simple, I found cancellation to be more complex than I would have liked. Parts of this situation have improved in the last couple of Go releases (as I have noted below). I hope this positive trend continues in a way that allows the Go ecosystem to easily propagate cancellation, deadlines, and request values. My intent in this report — as well as the proposal I created back in May 2017 — is to give background and feedback to inform future design decisions. Suggestions for solutions welcome!

(Thanks to Ian Lance Taylor, Damien Neil, Cassandra Salisbury, and Andrew Bonventre for reviewing this report for accuracy and clarity.)