Bookmarks (146)

We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly — Even if you wouldn’t want to do this, it’s interesting to read about the experience of a team that has.

Go Slice Gotchas — “Just like any other dynamically growable container structure, slices come with a few gotchas. I don’t always remember all the rules I need to be aware of, so this is an attempt to list some of the most common mistakes I’ve made at least once.”

Reduce Your Apache Kafka Costs + Ops Burden With WarpStream — WarpStream reduces Kafka costs by 80+% by eliminating disks and interzone networking fees and features zero ops auto-scaling. It runs in your private cloud and data is stored in your object storage buckets, so raw data never leaves your environment.

Go 1.24 Released — Finally, after many months of blog posts getting excited about Go 1.24’s new features, the real deal has arrived. It’s a reasonably big release too, including a lot of updates:

go-taskflow: A Taskflow-Like DAG Task Execution Framework — A general-purpose task-parallel framework for Go, suitable for complex dependency management in concurrent tasks.

sturdyc: Caching Library with Advanced Concurrency Features — “A sturdy gopher shielding data sources from rapidly incoming requests.” Designed to avoid cache stampedes and overloading in high throughput systems by providing non-blocking reads and sharded writes for minimal lock contention.

Eliminating Shadow Access: The Hidden Dangers of SSH and API Keys — Static keys create hidden security risks. Learn how to replace them with dynamic, identity-based access. Register now!

httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS Requests Made by Any Linux Program — It uses Linux-only network namespaces for now, but this is a Go-powered process-scoped HTTP tracer you can run without root privileges. It even decrypts TLS traffic by generating a CA on the fly. Handy for debugging or seeing if dependencies or apps are ‘phoning home,’ perhaps..

Go Programs Freezing When Launched by Steam — Ebitengine’s lead developer reported an unusual bug to the Steam team – Go programs (e.g. games) launched by the popular Steam game launcher were failing due to Steam interfering with Go’s runtime in some way. This has since become a bug being discussed on the Go repo with some workarounds but no full resolution yet.

Upcoming Workshop on Building Backend Web Apps in Go — Join us for a two day workshop (either online or in person) and develop your Go know-how. We'll focus on using Go to build backend web apps, along with learning Go data structures, interfaces, how to write unit tests, and more.

How a Malicious Package Exploited Module Proxy Caching for Persistence — Researchers have uncovered a sophisticated supply chain attack exploiting both typosquatting and then Go’s module proxying caching to remain undetected for years. It’s worth understanding the mechanism behind this in case you run into it yourself.

Proposal: math/rand/v2 Worked, Let's Do sync/v2! — Creating ‘v2’ versions of standard packages is Go’s compromise for modernization vs stability. With the evolution of math/rand a success, Ian thinks synchronization primitives are due an upgrade too. Much of the value here comes from a month’s worth of discussion, including people’s discontent over the ‘v2’ approach (outlined further here).

A Minesweeper Game Written in Go — A cute example of putting together a game in such a way that it not only runs on the desktop in the usual way, but can be taken to the Web too. The effects are cute, too – this is a great use of the Ebitengine game engine. The GitHub repo is certainly worth a look if...

🔊 volume-go: A Cross-Platform Way to Control Sound Volume — Leaning on a different technique for each OS, it supports macOS, Linux, and Windows. If you want it wrapped up into a nice Go TUI, Volgo is for you.

Feluda: A Tool to Analyze the Licences of Dependencies — It’s a Rust-powered project but which can be used to process the dependencies of Go, Rust or Node.js projects and return a report (or show a TUI interface) on potentially restrictive licenses that apply.

etree 1.5: A Library to Parse and Generate XML Easily — A simple, straightforward approach to working with XML in Go, inspired by Python’s ElementTree. XML documents are represented as trees for easily traversal and you can create, import, modify and save XML. Queries can be done with a XPath-like approach.

Zog: 'Next Gen' Schema Validation for Go — Zod is a popular TypeScript-based runtime schema validation library and Zog is a take on the same idea in Go so you can define validations and run them against values and structs. GitHub repo.

Product Management Is Broken. Engineers Can Fix It — How redefining how PMs and engineers work together helped PostHog optimize everything they do for speed and autonomy.

How to Release to Homebrew with GoReleaser, GitHub Actions and Semantic Release — The steps involved in automating the release of a Go project (maybe your new command line tool or TUI?) that’s available via Homebrew (as most commonly used on macOS).

Proposal: A Way to Reduce Error Handling Boilerplate with ? — A proposal to streamline error handling using a ? operator. This new syntax could reduce boilerplate by optionally handling errors and returning early or executing an error handling block.

Go 1.24's go tool is One of the Best Additions in Years — Go 1.24 isn’t even fully here yet (though rc2 is out) and people are already very excited. One major enhancement is the new go tool command and tool directive in go.mod, which simplifies handling dependencies for dev-time tooling and improves performance by caching runs and reducing dependency bloat.

Keep Your Apps Fast and Error-Free with Honeybadger — Honeybadger helps you fix errors, eliminate performance bottlenecks, and dig into the details faster than ever before. With support for Go, Ruby, and 8 other languages, it’s the best way to gain real-time insights into your application’s health and performance.

Maps are Faster in Go 1.24 — It’s thanks to so-called Swiss Tables and you don’t need to make any changes to benefit from the new implementation. Just upgrading to Go 1.24 will unlock the gains.

Go Slices: Shared Memory and append() Pitfalls — A look at some potential tripping points in Go when it comes to working with slices and sub-slices. Rob Pike’s 2013 post on the official Go blog is also a great resource on this topic.

Centrifugo v6: A Scalable Real-Time Messaging Server — Imagine an open source, self-hosted equivalent to Pubnub or Pusher for passing messages to users of real-time apps over WebSocket, HTTP streaming, SSE, and more. It’s language agnostic, but written in Go. GitHub repo.

Maddy 0.8: A Composable All-in-One Mail Server — Can work as an MTA, accept messages via SMTP, store messages and even provide access to them over IMAP. v0.8 requires Go 1.23+ but adds support for HAProxy’s PROXY protocol and handling DNS-01 challenge records.

gno.land Offers Grants & Bounties for Go-Powered Decentralized Apps — App builders, Go enthusiasts, tinkerers: come and build on gno.land, a smart contract platform for a freer, fairer world.

Bunster: Compile Shell Scripts to Static Binaries — bash scripts are already quite portable, but if you want to transpile them to Go and turn them into binaries, here you go.

asyncmachine-go: A Declarative Control Flow Library — Implements AOP and the actor model through a clock-based state machine for building autonomous, stateful workflows.

Forgejo 10.0: A Go-Powered Self-Hosted Software Forge — Think Gitea (indeed, it’s a fork of it – more on that here) but with even more features make it a full on GitHub replacement. It powers the Codeberg platform and you can see it in action in Forgejo’s own repo. A new version 10.0 has just dropped.

▶  Go in the Smallest of Places — A GopherCon 2024 talk about the potential and technicalities of using TinyGo to build Go-powered systems on microcontrollers.

▶  How to Build an MMO Game with Godot 4 and Go — A thirteen video YouTube series on building a multiplayer online game using the popular Godot game engine (no relation to Go) and with Go handling the backend.

Protect Against Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — With WorkOS Radar you can detect, verify and block harmful behaviour, protecting your app with advanced device fingerprinting. Stop fake signups, stop free tier abuse, and stop bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

Go 1.24 Release Candidate 2 Released — We’re another step down the road to the eventual release of Go 1.24, and the Go team are particularly keen for you to kick the tires of the second release candidate: “Run it in dev! Run it in prod! File bugs!” RC2 isn’t a significant jump from RC1 but the draft release notes continue to improve and...

The First Newsletter Dedicated to Product Engineers — The fastest growing startups increasingly rely on product engineers. They can both figure out what to build and actually build it. Product for Engineers is dedicated to sharing the skills and strategies needed to succeed in this role.

go-haystack: Track Personal Devices via Apple's 'Find My' Network — An interesting way to track personal Bluetooth devices via Apple’s massive “Find My” network by way of TinyGo and a little extra hardware.

ebpf-go 0.17: A Way to Work with eBPF from Go — A pure Go library to read, modify and load eBPF programs for use directly by the Linux kernel (eBPF is a neat technology worth exploring if you’re not familiar with it yet). The new 0.17 release requires Go 1.22+ and introduces a new API to work with global variables.

An Interactive Tour of Go 1.24 — A list of all the significant new 1.24 features. Each is accompanied by interactive, runnable examples so you can see generic type aliases in action, make (and clean up) weak pointers, play with file access, and see benchmarks for the new faster map implementation. Go 1.24 is expected to land in the next month or two, with RC2...

go-mail v0.6: A Library for Sending Emails — If you’ve got email to send, go-mail can do the job. v0.6 adds support for S/IME signing, SMTP auth auto-discovery, Unix domain socket support, and a ‘quick send’ feature.

Realizing Why Go Reflection Restricts What Struct Fields Can Be Modified — Private (unexported) fields can’t be modified, even when using reflection. When looking at this through Rust-colored glasses, it makes more sense.

A Practical Example of Dependency Inversion using Plugins — An example of using Clean Architecture principles with Go’s plugin package to create an app that’s adaptable and extendable without modifying the core source code.

Gophers Pack: A Collection of Gopher Pictures and Design Elements — If you want some handy Go gopher themed images to use for a project, blog post, or presentation, this myriad of cute CC0 (public domainish) elements could be a big help. We use them a lot in this newsletter and Maria has recently added a variety of winter themed options.

if got, want: A Simple Way to Write Better Go Tests — “There’s an excellent Go testing pattern that too few people know. I can teach it to you in 30 seconds” is quite the pitch. The trick is using both assignments and a comparison on a single if line to make a test easier to read — it’s even used in the standard library.

Build Go Apps using Project IDX and the Gemini API — IDX is a Google-developed AI-assisted online workspace for full-stack app development. Here’s the bare basics of getting started with it for Go work.

How I Program with LLMs — The co-founder of Tailscale shares his thoughts on modern approaches to writing Go code with numerous LLM-powered techniques and shares off a new LLM-powered ‘Go playground’ he’s working on.

Master the Fullstack — Expand your abilities to the server with this comprehensive learning path. You'll learn how to create APIs, build containers, deploy code, set up servers, and much more.

templ: A Way to Build HTML with Go — Create components that render fragments of HTML and compose them to create screens, pages, documents, and apps. GitHub repo.

Go Developer Survey 2024 H2 Results — The results of the latest Go community survey are out. Over 4000 responses were analyzed with developers largely being satisfied with Go’s direction, but finding maintaining consistent coding standards to be the biggest challenge. Linux and macOS lead the way with OS choice, VS Code and GoLand for IDEs, and AWS when it comes to clouds. We...

Rust vs Go in 2025 — An updated look at a topic that John often covers but with the same conclusion as ever: it’s worth knowing both languages.