Trying Go

It feels like the Go programming language is having a bump in popularity in 2024. Several folks in my social media feeds have been trying out Go or evaluating it for use in a project. I had read and completed A Tour of Go in the spring as well as read Go by Example and Effective Go. I enjoyed reading these and was excited to try out using Go for a small project.

The circumstances aligned at work where I needed a small application to run on developer’s machines and I wanted to avoid having to have the user set up a full set of dependencies: just download and run. This seemed like a great place for trying out some Go! I had such a fun time writing this application. I am sure I did not follow standard conventions as I was unfamiliar with them, but I had a blast building the application.

The project required extracting data from one system via API and publishing to another. I was able to use an existing module to handle both the extraction and publishing. I really enjoyed how quickly Go builds projects and also found the standardized testing to be very interesting. I felt like I was able to iterate and build quickly as well as define the custom data types I needed without too much boilerplate.

In the end, the application is only about 600 lines of Go and I only scraped the surface of the language, but I had so much fun building it. I look forward to building out more features for the application if necessary and would be eager to write more Go in the future.