I've been on a roll lately with ginning up little utilities with golang:
feedspool-go: A CLI tool for managing RSS/Atom feeds with SQLite storage and static website generation.
linkding-to-opml: Quick & dirty tool to turn Linkding bookmarks into an OPML file of feed subscriptions
feed-to-mastodon: A command-line tool that fetches RSS/Atom feeds and posts new entries to Mastodon with customizable templates.
These each follow a similar pattern:
They're each written in go, distributed as a standalone CLI binary with YAML configuration and a SQLite database.
I'm using GitHub Actions to run lint, test, and build rolling releases across Linux, macOS, and Windows.
I'm leaning on Claude Code to do boring boilerplate work and draft unit tests
If I keep this up, I'm thinking I might need to throw together something like tools.simonwillison.net to inventory these things as I accumulate them.
It's kind of addicting to throw a boilerplate spec doc at Claude Code, go make coffee while it spews out all the usual code for one of these tools, then come back and sort of not-quite-vibe all the desired features into existence.
I'm feeling the mental dread cost of little ideas go way, way down.
Like, I went from thinking "something like feed-to-mastodon would be nice to have" to having a first version of feed-to-mastodon in the span of 45 minutes.
That first-version hump and all the initial startup ceremony is usually what stops me from starting.
Also, for some reason, I've been avoiding golang for my side-projects.
I'm not sure why? I think maybe I thought Rust was more solid for this stuff and turned my nose up at golang?
Though Rust is definitely solid, I'm finding golang to be way less ceremonial for these quick and dirty little tools.
The ceremony in Rust is also a frequent bouncer for me, especially when the stakes are so low.
I'm also finding the self-contained binary delivered by golang to be a lot easier to manage than node.js or Python scripts that pull in so many dependencies just to get running on a new server.
I'm also really appreciating the built-in stuff like text/template, to the point that I'm now even eyeing up my Easy-Blog Oven and considering rewriting my blog's static site generator, currently implemented in node.js. (uh oh)
