Category: Golang (Page 2 of 3)

Eliminate the undocumented TODOs with todocheck

July 19, 2020 / Preslav Mihaylov / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I released todocheck – a new kind of static code analyser for annotated TODOs.

Way too often, we let leftover TODOs slip into our main branch, which leaves your coworkers puzzles, looking at it a year from now.

They’re thinking – what did I mean by “TODO: Move this to the users package”? What is the users package? It doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

todocheck helps you fix this by forcing you to mark all your TODOs against an existing, open issue in your issue tracker.

That way, if you, at some point, close the issue, thinking you’re done, the CI pipeline will sparkle in red as there is an open, unaddressed TODO in your main branch.

No longer can developers close a half-baked issue, rushing for the weekly sprint review to say “I’m done!”.

A Concise Guide to the Latest Go Generics Draft Design

June 18, 2020 / Preslav Mihaylov / 0 Comments

Recently, the Go team announced an updated draft design for their Generics in Go proposal. It goes into a lot of details about why certain decisions were made, implementation details, etc.

In this article, my goal is to summarise the major upcoming changes, as the whole draft design can be a mouthful for many.

I will provide some code snippets to demonstrate the major features as well as give you the chance to experiment yourself with them, thanks to the new Go playground with support for generics.

How to Use Structured Logs in your Go Application

June 13, 2020 / Preslav Mihaylov / 0 Comments

This article is part of the series Integrating your Go service with ELK

The Elastic stack (also referred to as ELK) can bring a lot of value to your production services. But it is not that much of value if you don’t use structured logs in your services.

In one of my latest posts, I wrote about what ELK is and why you should care. I also wrote a tutorial about how to integrate ELK with your Go app.

In this article, I will walk you through how to integrate structured logging in your Go services. We will use a sample HTTP service with a few basic endpoints and we’ll use the zap library to emit logs on error/success, which would also include some domain-specific info.

How to integrate your Go Service with ELK

May 16, 2020 / Preslav Mihaylov / 0 Comments

This article is part of the series Integrating your Go service with ELK

In my last post, I shared how much value the ELK stack could bring for your application in terms of the monitoring capabilities it gives you.

In this post, I will walk you through how to integrate your Go application with ELK, what are the different parts of ELK, how they work and how to create a basic configuration for them.

Let’s jump straight in, shall we?

Managing Shared Components in Go Microservices with Fx

April 12, 2020 / Preslav Mihaylov / 0 Comments

This article is part of the series Dependency Injection in Go using Fx

In many companies nowadays, microservices is the de facto way of handling service architecture.

Some do it out of necessity as their application has reached a scale where the monolith is a bottleneck. Others, simply like being onboard the hype train.

Whatever the scenario, the decision is often backed by the classical case for adopting microservices, which every junior dev studies extensively before their system design interview.

What gets often neglected, however, is the problems which come with such an approach.
Each of these problems usually demands a sophisticated solution, which raises system complexity.

One such problem is how to reuse the shared infrastructure components in your microservices. Each of your services will probably have a distinct business logic, but it will also come with a big baggage of infrastructure code.

These components usually don’t change too much between your services – healthchecks, monitoring configs, logging, standard service configurations, etc.

Fortunately, there is a very elegant solution for this problem for your Go services, which utilises the Fx Framework. It helps you by automatically managing your dependencies, but it can do much more than that as I’ll show you in the upcoming sections.

In this article, I will show you how to effectively extract your components into reusable & independent modules which can easily be shared across your Go services.