Adventures with the Go programming language

After 10+ years of working with Java, I spent the last year working with Ruby & Rails. Let’s just say I’m not a fan. I wanted to learn something new and I’ve heard a lot of good things about Go. Quite a few projects use Go: Docker, Hugo, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and many more.

Three weeks ago, I picked up a copy of “The Go Programming Language” by Donovan & Kernighan. Yes, the same Kernighan that co-wrote the famous, “The C Programming Language”.

In order to learn it, I needed a real life scenario, I needed a project. Why not port, sm_photo_tool, my Smugmug command line tool from python to Go lang? That will give me experience with how Go handles parsing arguments, classes, REST APIs, concurrent uploads, and a bunch more things.  It’s the perfect project to learn Go.

In the next post I’ll talk about structs in Go.