Go With The Domain Three Dots Labs

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You write business software

Okay, we can’t know that for sure. But if you work on any web application or user-facing product, chances are you work with complex business domains.

Go 2023 Survey shows that 74% of respondents write API/RPC services, and 42% use Go for web programming. We guess most of these applications are not trivial.

What’s inside the book

It’s 2017, and we join a startup. We work full-time in Go now, which starts getting popular.

It’s an exciting time, as we’re about to kick off an ambitious greenfield project. We’re determined to do the impossible: add features quickly and keep the application maintainable.

At this point, we’ve already seen complex software that’s hell to maintain. It’s often the key to the company’s success, but no one wants to touch it. The last thing we want is for our application to end up like this.

Some may think it’s the natural order of things, but we naively can’t accept that. So we spend evenings studying books on Domain-Driven Design, reading blogs on Clean Architecture, and watching talks on CQRS and Event-Driven Programming.

These patterns are supposedly used only in enterprise applications, so there is almost nothing on the web on using them in Go. We’re in the dark most of the time but also fueled with enthusiasm. We push through and apply the ideas, trying things out on the way.

We find out the patterns work, and they play well with Go. Go’s explicit and straightforward way of doing things is a perfect fit for the domain-focused approach. Our team feels productive, collaboration goes smoothly, and it’s fun to work with the project.

We also see again and again that implementation details are often just… details. We realize how important it is to get the domain code right. Not only in the “clean code” sense but also in a “correctly modeled” way. We give up some coding time to talk with people and better understand what we’re going to build. It always pays back.

We’d love to tell you everything turned out to be a huge success, but that’s not what happened. It’s the startup reality you don’t read about on Hacker News. However, we’ve learned a lot from our successes and (especially) mistakes.

Over the last few years, we kept working on the ideas, and we still keep improving them. Go with the Domain is our attempt to share what we’ve learned with you.

How is this book different

Examples are great for learning, so we decided to create a real, open-source, and deployable web application that would help us show the patterns. All chapters follow the same project, refactored over time.

Most of the ideas in this book shine in applications with complex business scenarios. Some make sense in simpler cases, and some will look like terrible over-engineering if used in small projects. We share some hints on being pragmatic and choosing the best tool for the job.

We base Go with the Domain on articles from our blog. The book is a work in progress. We update it with each new post coming out.

Who we are

We’re Miłosz and Robert, co-founders of Three Dots Labs and creators of Watermill.

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