A collection of real world advice for writing maintainable Go programs.

Presentations

• QCon Shanghai 2018
• GopherCon Singapore 2019

Fundamentals

• What is the zero value, and why is it useful?
• The empty struct
• On declaring variables
• Go has both make and new functions; what gives?
• Should methods be declared on T or *T?
• Slices from the ground up
• If a map isn’t a reference, what is it?
• A variable’s name should be independent of its type

Commentary

• Associative commentary (part 1, part 2)

Package design

• Avoid package names like base, util, or common
• Go without package scoped variables

Project design

• Five suggestions for setting up a Go project
• Use internal packages to reduce your public API surface

API design

• Functional options for friendly APIs
• Don’t force allocations on the callers of your API
• Be wary of functions which take several parameters of the same type

Error handling

• Don’t just check errors, handle them gracefully
• Inspecting errors
• Constant errors
• Errors vs exceptions (part 1, part 2, part 3)
• Eliminate error handling by eliminating errors

Logging

• Let’s talk about logging

Concurrency

• Curious Channels
• Channel axioms
• Ice cream makers and data races
• Never start a goroutine without knowing how it will stop
• Context isn’t for cancellation

Testing

• How to write benchmarks in Go
• Simple test coverage, (part 1, part 2)
• Test fixtures on Go
• Prefer table driven tests