Firestore

Did you ever hear about a project where changes were tested on customers you don’t like or countries that aren’t profitable? Or even worse: did you work on such a project? It’s not enough to say that it’s unfair and unprofessional. It’s also hard to develop anything new because you’re afraid to make any change in your codebase. In the 2019 HackerRank Developer Skills Report, Professional growth & learning was marked as the most important factor when looking for a new job.

I’ve seen a lot of complicated code in my life. Pretty often, the reason for that complexity was application logic coupled with database logic. Keeping the logic of your application together with your database logic makes your application much more complex, harder to test, and harder to maintain. There is already a proven and simple pattern that solves these issues. This pattern allows you to separate your application logic from database logic.

If you’re here for the first time, this post is part of our Business Applications in Go series. Previously, we introduced Wild Workouts, our example application built with modern tools but containing some subtle anti-patterns. We added them on purpose to show common pitfalls and how to avoid them. In this post, we begin refactoring Wild Workouts. Previous articles will give you more context, but reading them isn’t necessary to understand this one.

In the previous post, Robert introduced Wild Workouts, our example serverless application. Every week or two, we release new articles about this project, focusing on creating business-oriented applications in Go. In this post, I continue where Robert left off and describe the infrastructure setup. We picked Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the provider of all infrastructure parts of the project. We use Cloud Run for running Go services, Firestore as the database, Cloud Build as CI/CD, and Firebase for web hosting and authentication.

Welcome to the first article from the series covering how to build business-oriented applications in Go! In this series, we want to show you how to build applications that are easy to develop, maintain, and fun to work with in the long term. This series doesn’t focus too heavily on infrastructure and implementation details. But we need some foundation to build on later.