O1 — Revitalising my Golang (Introduction) — A Series

TL;D(want to)R

I’ll be sharing snippets of what I’m learning from two Golang courses I’m taking during this holiday. Evolve Credit, School, etc…

I hope you’ll read it now.

A few weeks ago, just about the time Fall 2020 semester was closing out finals approaching and work getting much more intense, I realized I haven’t really been learning for a long time (skillset wise), that’s painful. Well, I had always known and it has been frustrating, but I gave myself excuses. Excuses like I had to do the work required of me for Evolve Credit to stay alive and functional (we’re not quite there yet, but we’re making progress), I also have to attend my lectures in school, so I was either studying, working, finishing up assignments or sleeping. It’s difficult.

Here’s my desktop background for your viewing.

To simply put, 2020 has been intense for me, but not in the way many people will interpret the same phrase. COVID was not one of my problems, (I have feelings that’s out of my naivety and or ignorance about a bunch of things surrounding the pandemic), my primary challenge was staying sane while trying to meet my academic demands and making sure Evolve’s engineering goals are met. Again, it’s difficult.

That said, I decided to take an actual step at learning just after my last final for the Fall Semester. I have bought two Golang courses on Udemy.

Random: I enjoy cartel movies.

Enough of the story, I am 20% into the first course, and the initial parts of the course are already boring me out, (basics of Golang) and I do not want to skip anything. There are interesting parts of Golang that I am not quite good at and I look forward to those sections. I think by going through the whole thing, I’d be able to pick up the best practice tips that I may not know before now and also upskill.

Things I am not necessarily good at are;

1. Golang Interfaces
2. Automated Testing (Not specific to Golang)
3. Software Architecture/Design

There’s more, but I am focusing on these. Truth is, 2 and 3 are not necessarily specific to Golang, they are skill sets that are required when Evolve Credit begins to scale, and I see that happening in one form or another in 2021. I want us to be prepared. At Evolve, Golang powers our entire backend so I might as well start from there.

For the courses I’m taking, here you go:

1. Go — The Complete Developer’s Guide by Stephen Grider

• I chose this course primarily because of the title and the title of the author. Stephen is an Engineering Architect, and he uses Go. I’m big on learning towards a goal. My role at Evolve is constantly Evolving (no pun intended), I just need to be capable and I really enjoy this Software Architecture thing anyway.

2. Unit, Integration and functional testing in Go by Fredicio Leon

• To be honest, I just want to learn to test properly. I get panic attacks when I imagine how unstructured our tech at Evolve is at the moment. I don’t like that (perks of moving fast). We can’t move slowly, the system also needs to be reliable, so automated tests.

Conclusion

This is the first of a series of articles, the next few articles will be much more technical than this. I will be sharing my progress here. I am also starting a habit of writing more, so I will very likely be writing about myself, building Evolve Credit with Akan Nelson, and academics at AUB.

What should you expect in the next issue of this series?

1. A summary of the first few lessons of Stephen’s course. I need to be sure I am allowed to publish these. We’ll see.

Outside the series?

1. More interesting stories about me and what I’m up to. I hope you enjoy it.

Ciao!
Daniel.