Learn Programming with Go, One Game at a Time

Learn Programming with Go, One Game at a Time

For nearly a year now, I've been building my first online programming course - it's about learning to program with the Go (Golang) programming language. 👨‍💻

It contains nearly 26 hours of instructional video, covering the fundamentals of programming via the Go programming language. 🎥

But apart from just covering some basic concepts in a handful of videos, it also consists of 75 well crafted exercises, which aim to help you master what you've learnt in the videos, but also stretch you with some extra challenges, so that you become more and more autonomous as the course progresses. 🔥

I prefer that you sweat a bit now and become very resilient for what's to come later in your career rather than having a "feel-good" experience to begin with and struggle once you get your first job. 💪

However, this course is also about building stuff. 🧱

When I first started programming, the intellectual challenge of solving random coding challenges was exciting, but what sparked my passion for the craft was using it to build something meaningful.

For me, that moment came when I built my first video game. The feeling of making a character move on the screen for the first time is hard to describe. 🎮

That's why I won't even bother doing that. Instead, I'll let you experience that joy yourself by building some of the most popular arcade video games using what you've learnt in the course:
✅ Snake 🐍
✅ Pong 🏓
✅ Hangman
✅ Zombie Shooter 🧟

So, if that all got you excited, embark on this awesome journey and make sure to have fun along the way 🚀 :

Go check it out!

How to set up Vim for Go Development

One of the major reasons I love programming in Go is that I can do it in any IDE or editor I want, including my favourite Vim editor.

Unlike Java, for example, which is highly coupled to IntelliJ or Eclipse, Go is much more lightweight and the tools you use with it can be integrated with any editor.

In this guide, I will help you setup your Vim as a fully-fledged Go IDE, including the plugins you need to install but also setting up the important options & mappings which you'll use daily.

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gRPC With Go Crash Course

gRPC With Go Crash Course

In this crash course, we'll cover everything you need to know about gRPC and integrating it with your Go applications.

Each of the sub-articles below are written in a way that they are independent from one another, so if you're interested in only going through a specific part of the course, feel free to do so.

The only article which is mandatory is the Introduction, which covers what kind of application you'll be building as well as what kind of software you need to install/configure to avoid any technical issues throughout the course.

If you encounter any issues or bugs in the article/code, feel free to open an issue in the Github repo for this course.

If you enjoy the course & want to support me I'd be more than grateful if you ⭐ the repo, share the series, say thanks on Twitter or sponsor my work 🙏

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gRPC with Go Crash Course – Bidirectional Streams

gRPC with Go - Bidirectional Streams

This article is part of the series gRPC With Go Crash Course

In this part of the course, you will implement the most challenging RPC routine type which gRPC has to offer - bidirectional streams.

These routines are used to achieve bidirectional client-server communication - meaning that communication can flow both ways. A way to achieve this using traditional HTTP technologies is via web sockets. With gRPC, you have support for such communication natively.

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gRPC With Go Crash Course – Unidirectional Streams

gRPC with Go - Unidirectional Streams

This article is part of the series gRPC With Go Crash Course

In this part of the course, you will implement slightly more challenging RPC routines which involve utilising the gRPC streaming capabilities.

These are essentially a way to achieve client-side or server-side pagination. However, in contrast to normal HTTP APIs, in gRPC these streaming utilities are first-class citizens rather than a useful add-on (e.g. via web sockets).

There is also support for bidirectional streams, which we will explore in the follow-up exercise. In this one, we’ll focus on unidirectional (client-side/server-side) streaming RPCs.

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gRPC With Go Crash Course – Service Schemas

gRPC with Go - Service Schemas

This article is part of the series gRPC With Go Crash Course

In this article, you will create a gRPC/Protobuf schema for a small micro service system for an online casino. 

The scope of the article is to: 

  • Create the service schemas
  • Correctly generate the protobuf Go sources
  • Implement the gRPC servers/clients for the appropriate microservices
  • Integrate the microservices with each other
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gRPC With Go Crash Course – Introduction

gRPC with Go - Introduction


This article is part of the series gRPC With Go Crash Course

In the following set of articles, you'll learn how gRPC works by building several simple web applications and hook them together using gRPC.

The articles won't go into details of what gRPC is and what's its purpose. There's a lot of existing material on the subject already. Instead, they focus on helping you get some real practice using gRPC, integrating it into your own applications & understanding the core mechanisms it provides.

First, we'll cover what we're about to build & the environment setup you'll need for the rest of the articles.

Additionally, have in mind that all the parts of the course are written in a way that they are independent from each other. So if you're not interested in the whole course and want to jump straight to Bidirectional Streams (for example), feel free to do so.

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Thread-Safety in Go – an Overlooked Concern

Thread-Safety in Go - An overlooked concern
Gopher on image was designed by Renee French. (http://reneefrench.blogspot.com/)

When you first start tinkering with concurrency in any language, what's the most sought after goal is extracting the maximum output from the hardware you have available.

That's why we use it and study it in the first place - to achieve optimal parallelism & get some significant speed-up for our apps out of the box.

However, a not so glamorous part of studying the subject is understanding how to write thread-safe code. The techniques and principles which will enable you to keep your application well-behaved, even after scaling it to dozens of threads.

Even though this is an important thing to consider while writing concurrent code, it is often overlooked in most learning resources about concurrency. This problem is even more relevant in the Go community due to two common misunderstandings I will cover in the article.

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