James Ainslie

Software Engineer and Open Source Evangelist

Gogopher

Years: 12
Proficiency: 95
Production miles: 92
Affection: 96
Foot-guns survived: 35

Go

To say I love Go is an understatement. It is just without a doubt the most powerful mix of capabilities I have discovered in my journey in technology, it is at once simple, readable and immensely powerful. Iit rewards decisions that remain legible long after I’ve forgotten making them. Its real strength isn’t minimalism; it’s the way the language limits how much private cleverness a codebase can accumulate. In Go, abstraction has to earn its keep in public. Interfaces are most useful when discovered by the code consuming them, errors force operational policy into view, and even repetition can serve as an honest map of where the domain still resists unification. After years with Go, I’ve become sensitive to its negative space: the features it withholds, the shortcuts it declines to sanctify, the hierarchies it makes awkward. Those absences create a subtle social pressure. They keep programmers negotiating with the problem instead of disappearing into personal dialects. I may dislike a local implementation, but I can usually enter it quickly, predict its failure modes, and change it without first reconstructing the author’s worldview.

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Welcome to my corner of the internet. Software development is the most fun you can have by yourself. And it's certainly a lot more fun when you collaborate. I set up this site for people interested in my ideas and the projects that fascinate me. I have been doing this for a long time and while I have worn many hats in the technology space, I seem to always come back to software.

My blog is a place for me to share ideas and observations. It's stream of consciousness stuff. Forgive the occasional pretension/mistake. Projects are either concepts I am working on, in flight projects or mature experiments. They sort of represent what's on the workbench right now. I take developer ergonomics seriously, and resources are the Cheat Sheets I use for my various keyboard first approaches to development. My Resume speaks for itself. I have been playing extensively with Three.js and WebGL over the last three years, and Skills is an infographic that is generated by crawling all my repos and tries to articulate the 'shape' of my technical artifacts taken as a whole.

The 'Top Trumps' inspired skill cards are designed to give you a highlight reel of the technology I use as part of my technological canon. If you click on the details button, you will get some of my thoughts about them.

I hope you enjoy my work!

Warmest regards,

James

This is a little emulator I set up so you can navigate my site and try three of the CLI projects I am working on: stave, dot and gomdlint.

jamesainslie.dev

The terminal is a place for you to play with them, without having to install them. Just power on the environment on the menu bar of this terminal and enjoy!

Here is what is installed, enjoy!

gomdlint a fast markdown linter
dot a dotfile manager
stave a build tool whose targets are plain Go functions, written by James Ainslie and Omer Preminger at yaklab
Go 1.26 for building and running whatever you write

checking the machines