At one point in my career, I was no longer excited about the software I was building.
My favorite part of the job were low-level details and complex algorithms. After switching to user-facing applications, they were mostly gone. It seemed programming was about moving data from one place to another using existing libraries and tools. What I’ve learned so far about software wasn’t that useful anymore.
Let’s face it: most web applications don’t solve tough technical challenges.
Enums are a crucial part of web applications. Go doesn’t support them out of the box, but there are ways to emulate them.
Many obvious solutions are far from ideal. Here are some ideas we use that make enums safer by design.
iota Go lets you enumerate things with iota.
const ( Guest = iota Member Moderator Admin ) Full source: github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/go-web-app-antipatterns/02-enums/01-iota/role/role.go While Go is explicit, iota seems relatively obscure.
Cohesion is part of the low coupling, high cohesion principle that’s supposed to keep your code maintainable. While low coupling means few dependencies, high cohesion roughly translates to single responsibility. Highly cohesive code (a module or a function) is focused on a single purpose. Low cohesion means it does many unrelated things.
I’ve written about coupling in the previous article on anti-patterns. Here are some tips on increasing cohesion in Go applications using the recently released generics.
While writing this blog and leading Go teams for a couple of years, the most common question I heard from beginners was “What framework should I use?”. One of the worst things you can do in Go is follow an approach from other programming languages.
Other languages have established, “default” frameworks. Java has Spring, Python has Django and Flask, Ruby has Rails, C# has ASP.NET, Node has Express, and PHP has Symfony and Laravel.
Did you have a situation when you lost a ton of time finding a Go library for your need? In theory, you can check lists like Awesome Go or make a choice based on GitHub stars. But Awesome Go contains over 2600 libraries, and popularity is not always the best indicator of library quality. I often thought that it would be great to have a place where I could find just the best and battle-tested libraries I could use in my project.
