Learning Go

Two weeks ago, I decided to learn Go. And as with learning any programming language or technology, you have to use it, build stuff, or you're not learning.

But what do I build with it? I enjoy cloud development, and although I use AWS at work, there are core services I haven't really used. So I've chosen to build a project using API Gateway (not really used this one beyond a hello-world), RDS (this is familiar), and Lambda (I know this well). It'll be a simple web service like a contacts manager - I do not want to build another todo app.😒

I plan to use CloudFormation for the infrastructure and Lambda would be my Go focus. I would dabble into the Go CDK for the infrastructure but I'm not confident it's stable enough to use at the time of writing this.

All this just for learning Go? Errr....Yes! It's a good excuse for me to also get stuck in a bit of infrastructure coding😉 . Plus, I've got my eyes on a few open source projects that use Go and I'd love to take the plunge and start contributing to open source projects.

My First Impressions

I'm fascinated by the fact that Go has a rich set of built-in APIs for almost anything you need. This for me means better productivity, but time will tell. It also means less external dependencies and the risk that comes with them, when I need to write code.

In addition, it seems easy to set up and get coding.

I'm sure there's loads more, but these are my first impressions.