Recently I was given a task of removing all keys that have null values from an arbirtrary json. We do data processing of Excel/csv files and have default config generated for them server-side. Users provide custom configuration (column types, names, headers, sorting …) and these two get merged. Problem was - if key existed and had null value it would override the key that had a value. Obviously there may be other ways to do this, but this is a very generic solution that can be used in most cases. Read more

A few months ago I started working on a project that heavily relies on RabbitMQ as a message broker. We have two clients communicating with Go, one via AMQP (RabbitMQ) and the other through HTTP. As our dependency on RabbitMQ is big, I had to write a robust client that does graceful shutdowns, panic recoveries, is multithreaded, logs everything nicely, and more. Read more

Go’s context is a hefty tool that was added as an official package back in 1.7. The context package provides contextual information that a goroutine may need such as how long it should run and how and when it should end. It can also pass informational key-value pairs for use down the call chain. But what if we need to pass information up in the call chain? Pointers come to the rescue. Read more

One of the greatest things about Go is how it deals with concurrency. It is far simpler compared to other languages. It uses so-called goroutines - a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime. While they are mostly used for asynchronous, fire-and-forget stuff (most common usage being HTTP multiplexers), I recently needed to have them updated post creation. The obvious first choice in Go would be to use channels, but trying to build the solution with them caused me some issues, which made me opt for a far simpler one - maps. Read more

I’ve started working with Go in early 2017, and since then most of my work has been writing RESTful APIs with it. With time I gained experience. and I constantly change the way I write APIs in Go. After a year of working with Go, I’ve released Gorsk - a Golang RESTful starter kit, and an update to it 6 months later. I get many emails and questions on how to use it properly, which means that something like Gorsk is highly needed. Over time I’d like to keep it up-to-date with my latest views on how to write REST APIs in Go, and this blog post serves as a first step in the next iteration. Read more

I never felt confident writing my ‘year in review’ until this year. I felt that I haven’t much to share, and even if I had I thought it wasn’t interesting. After reading a few similar posts from other bloggers, and having quite an interesting year, I thought that this year would be good to start with. Read more

Go’s standard library contains a single date package - time. The type provided by it, Time, contains date, time and location information. More often than not we don’t need location info, or we need to represent date/time only. dt provides exactly that, a time-zone-independent representation of time that follows the rules of the proleptic Gregorian calendar with exactly 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, and 60-second minutes. Read more

Enums (short of enumerators), identifiers that behave like constants, are useful parts of many languages. Unfortunately, enums in Go aren’t as useful due to Go’s implementation. The biggest drawback is that they aren’t strictly typed, thus you have to manually validate them. Read more

At my current company, we generate PDF reports for our customers that contains detailed statistics for checks done on a car. We did so by generating an HTML using Go Templating engine, then using Headless chrome inside docker container to generate PDF from HTML. Since we’re running on App Engine, we had to use Flex environment in order to support custom docker image, which resulted in higher cost and significantly slower deployment times. To move the service to standard environment, I rewrote the PDF generation to a Cloud Function. Read more

Building a live-chat server is a good practice for learning a ‘backend’ programming language. You need to provide an uninterrupted stream of data (think WebSockets), message storer and ideally a pubsub mechanism to send a message to all subscribed consumers. Goch is no different, besides HTTP and REST endpoint it uses WebSockets, Redis, and NATS-streaming to support live-chat messaging. Read how it runs and how you can build your own live-chat in Go. Read more

Last few months I spent my free time building Confello - a tech conference aggregator. You can read more about it HERE. I built it with GoBuffalo, a Go Web Framework. At first, I deployed the website on Heroku using the provided buffalo-heroku plugin. Before launching, I wanted to optimize the website on reverse proxy (gzip, expire headers …). Since Heroku doesn’t provide access to reverse proxy (Nginx), I looked for another solution. I found Dokku - which turned out to be great and easy to work with. Read more

Last few months I spent some of my free time working on a project I felt was missing in the tech space. I’m proud to announce that today we’re making Confello, a tech conference aggregator website, available for public. Find, browse and discuss your favorite tech Conferences at Confello! Read more

I’ve been working on a medium-sized European software as service (SaaS) for the last two years. Almost everything we use comes from Google, which includes Cloud Datastore as our primary source of truth. I’m not advocating against it - depending on your use-case it might be a great fit. Instead, I’m presenting the issues we have with it (and other NoSQL/document databases) due to our domain models being very relational. Read more

There are plenty of good reasons why you should start blogging right now or at least consider doing it. I’ve blogged previously about a decade ago and started doing it again since last year. I’ve seen plenty of benefits from this blog (and the previous one) and will talk about them in this blog post. In the end, I will propose a few modern solutions needed for starting your own blog. Read more

Refactoring source code should be a constant process in software’s lifecycle. I advocate for 20-25% of time spent on developing software to be used on refactoring exclusively. After working with Gorsk in two projects running now in production (one of them being a large SaaS), I’ve found many things I don’t like about it. During the development of those projects I refactored some things, but I decided the base needs to be updated too. Read more