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Going to GopherCon and Thoughts on Golang

GopherI am excited to go to GopherCon this year. I’ve been maintaining a couple of codebases written in Go/golang. Some are smaller webhook and automation programs, but a couple are larger data processing systems–take this data from these two sources, munge it a bit, put it over here. (Unfortunately, this is all custom, not using an ETL toolkit like, say, ratchet).

I’ve found Go to be an interesting challenge. It’s C based, but there are a few wrinkles/idioms that I’ve enjoyed figuring out (and more that I’m learning).

Things that surprised me:

  • GOPATH and the need for a domain name in paths.
  • That you have to search on golang to find anything useful.
  • The fact that any file in a package can add functions to any struct (I think I have the terms correct, please forgive me if I don’t)
  • The lack of an editor that can do reference searching (“show me all places this function is called”). I think VS.Code can do this, but have downloaded it and the Golang extension and can’t seem to figure out it. (This is likely my failing, not golangs, but I was looking forward to coding in a static language for just this reason. Well, this and safe refactoring.)
  • The strictness. I’m actually pleasantly surprised by it (no unused variables seems like such a no-brainer!) but golang is quite opinionated in terms of language syntax.

I unfortunately haven’t had as much time to write golang as I planned when signing up for this conference, but I’m looking forward to meeting some other folks and the excitement that always happens when you attend a conference. In particular, I’m looking forward to “Go says WAT?” which is patterned after the famous WAT video and “From prototype to production: Lessons from Reddit’s ad platform”. Hope to see you there.