Weekly Dev Update 1

Arden Labs Golang in AI Webinar

This week I had a chance encounter! I was listening to ‘Cup O’ Go’ podcast, where Bill Kennedy mentioned some of the trainings that Ardan Lab does, which led to me seeing the Ardan Labs was sponsoring a free Webinar on how to use Golang to create AI services! So many of my side projects related to AI were shelved because of how commited I am to learning Golang. However, I have had some bad experiences with conferences of late. Where I kept attending teaching events where the content was far too broad, tailored too specifically to beginners, or my favorite ’this could have been an email’. However, I was delightfully surprised at the level of this Webinar. I felt like my horizons expanded for what kinds of projects I can build using AI with strictly Golang! I learned a lot more about the ‘RAG’ approach, and how fine-tuning should generally be seen as a last resort. I have a lot of reading to do for Golang, but this really inspired me to consider giving some of the Ardan Lab Golang courses a shot in the future, once I’ve at least hit an intermediate level.

Building Web Server

I have been taking building an API to the next level, by building this web server. There were many challenges along the way, but I think the MVP is fully complete. I hooked up the PostgreSQL database, then got to work with some HTMX templates to create a nice login form, that switches to the registration form. You can register users, login, and the middleware package helps to protect routes that should require credentials. I chose a cookie / session approach because I am not a fan of JSON. One of the future goals would to make the authentication a little more fleshed out, more than an mvp. On registration, I need to make sure said email doesn’t already exist. I should be requiring a password length (symbols & numbers don’t protect a user enough to justify the hassle). I need logout, and sessions to be managed on the database, as right now it exists in server memory in a hashmap.

Sometime next week, I need to decide what kind of kind of app I want this simple web server / form to become. After what I learned from the webinar, I should probably dig up one of my old AI project ideas and just begin moving that into an MVP phase.