Golang

I recently tweeted about how people new to programming, or companies that look for candidates and give them programming tests, don’t understand that the first code one writes is just a draft. It can take several edits (so-called “refactors”) to tease out a good, workable, testable, and ultimately simple solution. So here’s a story of how I recently refactored my code 3 times before arriving at a final solution. This happened over the span of a day as I thought about and shaped the code into a format that can be easily tested and understood by others. The code is from a private project, so I am only presenting snippets here and some of the package names and variables have been changed for privacy. ...

I have been writing a lot of code in Go lately and recently I was asked by someone why I write in Go. Being put on the spot, I didn’t really have an answer, but it did get me thinking about why I like this language over the other languages I work with (Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript). So without any further ado, here are some things I like about working with Go. ...

If you program in Go and use it to access AWS resources, you’ll notice that each of the services in the SDK require a region to be explicitly specified. This is because AWS constructs an API endpoint that is region-specific and some company resources may exist in a specific region (not necessarily where the code is being run). If the code is knowingly trying to access AWS resources in the same region, it can be annoying to hardcode a region into the code. It makes the code rigid and brittle (non-portable). There is a way to have your code automatically determine its region. ...