I have been an official Go programmer for three years now. Unlike many people in my team, I remember the day Google announced go. I don’t remember if it was in Hacker News or /programming reddit, but I do remember watching the go math package compiling in less than a second, at the time, I was writing C++ for an embedded system. Building the whole model as we used to say took 45 minutes, this compiled our C/C++ project into a .out file for an ARM9 and a C55 DSP. When I saw how quickly Go built I was like, wow. To be fair, our build was for a Real Time OS so it didn’t even include the C++ standard library. Most of the time, if I remember right, was spent linking everything. THe linker was getting it’s poor butt kicked. Anyyway, I looked at Rob Pike (?) on YouTube and I was like,

Anyway, fast forward a few years to 2021, I’m in Seattle, working at Amazon on the retail website. I had recently implemented a simple job that does a very simple thing, I did it as a Lambda function in go. The Senior Devs in my team gave me flak for picking go as the language, citing that we are a Java shop and we are not guaranteed to have developers that can maintain a go package. Fair enough, but I pushed back saying that this particular thing was so simple, and the go implementation is so much less verbose. The Lambda was pushed to prod, but I was just a bit frustrated. Then I got an email from a manager in AWS asking me if I’d be willing to join his team, where they are looking for Gophers.

So yeah, 3 years ago I switched to AWS Fargate where I get to work on the Fargate Agent, the not-open source version of the ecs-agent.

So, all that to say, I’m still learning. I’m still learning go. I like how it is easy to get started on this language, but there are things that I still wrestle with. I still don’t really get interfaces, so I am working on that. Just now I was reading about Interface Pollution So hopefully I’ll have a deeper understanding of not only how to write interfaces (failry easily) but understand how to do it idiomatically as well as understand why they designed the language this way in the first place

Thank you Julia Evans for writing about go in your blog. And I can’t recommend 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them enough.

So, a few weeks ago I wanted to write a deep dive into Go Concurrency, but then life happens and it got abandoned. I’ll finish the article and post it here.

-JV