Go (Golang)
Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed for simplicity, efficiency, and excellent concurrency support. With Go expertise, I build high-performance backend services, CLI tools, and distributed systems leveraging goroutines and channels.
Overview
Go, created at Google in 2009, was designed to address shortcomings in other languages for large-scale software development. Combining the performance of compiled languages with the ease of use of interpreted languages, Go excels at building scalable, concurrent systems. Companies like Google, Uber, Twitch, and Docker rely heavily on Go for backend services and infrastructure.
My Go Experience
I have built production Go services including REST APIs, gRPC microservices, CLI tools, and distributed systems. My experience includes leveraging goroutines for concurrency, implementing graceful shutdown, optimizing performance, and deploying Go applications to Kubernetes and serverless platforms.
Backend Services
Developed high-performance REST APIs with Gin and Echo frameworks, implemented gRPC services for inter-service communication, designed middleware for authentication and logging, used context for request-scoped values and cancellation, and implemented rate limiting and circuit breakers for resilience.
Concurrency Patterns
Leveraged goroutines and channels for concurrent processing, implemented worker pools for bounded concurrency, used select for multiplexing channels, designed fan-out/fan-in patterns for parallel processing, and implemented proper error handling and context cancellation in concurrent code.
Production Deployment
Built single static binaries for Docker containers (<20MB with Alpine), implemented health checks and metrics with Prometheus, configured graceful shutdown handling signals, optimized memory and CPU usage through profiling (pprof), and deployed to Kubernetes with horizontal pod autoscaling.
Key Strengths
Go's core strengths include exceptional concurrency with goroutines, fast compilation and execution, simple language design for maintainability, comprehensive standard library, single binary deployment, excellent tooling, cross-platform compilation, and strong performance for server applications.
Concurrency Model
Go's concurrency is based on CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes). Goroutines are lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime, with overhead of ~2KB versus thread overhead of ~1MB. Channels provide type-safe communication between goroutines. The select statement enables multiplexing. This model makes concurrent programming accessible and efficient.
Ideal Use Cases
Go excels at microservices and REST APIs, gRPC services, CLI tools and utilities, distributed systems, cloud-native applications, DevOps tooling (Docker, Kubernetes built with Go), network servers, data processing pipelines, and system programming.