A project-based learning attempt at Go, Part-1

Go is an open-source general-purpose programming language created by some Google folks sometime in the late 2000s. Okay, I think this introduction is vague enough to be sightly annoying and yet, good enough by my standards, now onwards with the planning of the itinerary.

A person on discord says to me, “Tour of Go” is the first step to enlightenment, so of course I went and completed that one first. It was tedious in parts, adapting and learning new syntax but I finally hopped, skipped and jumped my way through it.

1. Tour of Go - Gained very basic familiarity with the syntax of Go, played around with Go code examples. Learnt basic concepts and implementations like maps and slices , pointers and interfaces,functions,closures and structs, goroutines and channels.

2. Concurrency (Go) - Went through this video to learn about concurrency concepts.

3. Developer Envionment Setup - Downloaded and installed go from their website. Set up the IDE (I am using VS Code ). Then installed Go extension for VS Code etc etc.

4. Structuring Go apps - This very useful talk covered the following principles and guidelines for structuring a Go app, generally speaking.

   • A flat structure is what you can kind of default to in the beginning.
   • Next we can try to break it up into packages this is called a layered architecture -> UI, Business logic, dependencies. But this has some problems.How do we share data between packages? Naming is difficult again. Circular dependencies happen, difficult to track.
   • Lets try breaking up into modules
   • Lets try grouping by context (Domain driven Design)
   • Hexagonal Architecture - Enables you to change a part of the application without changing everything else
   • Ends with proposing that trying to design the project structure using either Domain-Driven-Design or Hexagonal architechture might be a good way to go.

5. Follow the Go people on Twitter.(Important step)

6. Learn Go with Tests - Learning through Test Driven development(TDD) is a great way to incorporate good coding practices early on. This is a terrific hands-on resource that I am currently going through. TDD is a good process for writing bug-free,high quality, maintainable, readable, and easy to refactor code in the long run.

7. My next step is to build my first small project which is basically going to be a clone of https://news.ycombinator.com

And, here’s a quote to make this post look prettier than it actually is

“Because it’s not perfect, let’s not bother.” That’s crazy! Even if we take three steps forward and two and a half back it’s still going

half a foot forward.”