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 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

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

I’ve been dealing with RESTful services for the last three years, both professionally and for hobby projects. Since I came from SOAP/XML/Oracle background, REST felt so great and modern. Even though I felt late to the party, I think I didn’t lose that much. However, with the advancement of Cloud Native projects, I feel like I’m getting behind modern tools and technologies. And I want to change that. Read more

Recently we moved some of our hard-coded web-app configuration values into a YAML file. Arguing aside (YAML vs TOML vs …), YAML does a great job being easily readable by us - humans. By default, the yaml library marshals maps into map[string]interface{}, requiring a small change to get it marshaled into map[string]string. Read more

Twisk, an acronym for Twirp starter kit, helps you get started with a simple Golang RPC framework with protobuf service definitions - Twirp. It features everything from authorization, implemented CRUD on a single entity, logging, configuration and more. Using minimal dependencies, idiomatic code and best practices, it helps you get started with Golang backend API development - both JSON and Protobuf. Read more

I’ve previously written an Article on generating OpenAPI (Swagger) spec automatically within Golang. It’s the most popular article on this blog since lots of developers are searching for it. In it, I mentioned that in order to serve the swagger.json with SwaggerUI, a Docker instance is required that will serve SwaggerUI. There is an easier way to implement it, and this article will demonstrate how to do it with net/http, Gin and Echo. Read more

Recently I spent a lot of time working with both Gin and Echo. Primarily I wrote an open source restful starter kit named Gorsk (GitHub/Blog post). Besides Gorsk, I’m working on two web apps utilizing Gin/Echo. Even though the reasons for (not) using Golang’s ‘Web frameworks’ are mentioned quite often, I have built my own opinion on these. Read more

Until recently I never knew how simple it could be to automate a task in the browser. A client wanted me to build simple automation script for Chrome - it would log into his Drupal website, open Bootstrap settings and change cdn’s to the one found in config file. Sounded bit hard at the beginning, but after playing an hour with chromedp it became quite trivial. Example repo is available on GitHub. Read more

There are many ways to write a (RESTful) backend in Go. Most of the available tutorials are way too simple, with all the presented content fitting into a single file (or at most two-three). More complex examples are quite rare, and even most of them miss lots of things for the sake of reducing complexity. That’s one of the reasons I wrote Gorsk - to have a fully functional example of a RESTful backend (in Golang) utilizing best practices, idiomatic code, and minimal dependencies. Read more

Recently I found a client that needed to convert a list of txt files into csv - and he wanted the solution to be written in Go. Looking at the source files, I’m assuming the text files are generated by a script or a tool that extracts the data from somewhere. The good thing is that the provided files were very simple, so they are perfect for a tutorial like this. Read more

I’ve heard of Elasticsearch quite a while ago but started using around 6-7 months ago. It’s a very fine piece of technology, allowing you to create blazingly fast queries with very complex structure. Comming from a SQL background, I spent quality time reading through the official docs to write even the most basic queries. The purpose of this article is to save you that time and get you straight to work. Read more

Having a documentation for you your APIs is more useful than you might be thinking. Even if you don’t expose your APIs publicly, having the docs for your frontend or mobile team is way easier than sending them screenshots/snippets or using a paid product like Postman/Insomnia (premium version with syncing). With SwaggerUI, you can get a well-designed documentation for all your APIs automatically. When moving to Go I had issues setting it up, due to lacking documentation/tutorials, so I decided to write one. Read more