Topic

You’re an experienced programmer looking to get up and running quickly with Go. You want the knowledge, tools, and techniques to write idiomatic, professional-grade Go using fun exercises that get you comfortable with the language and its ecosystem. This is the workshop you’re looking for.

This immersive and hands-on workshop equips you with the essential knowledge and practical experience to become a proficient Go developer. Throughout this intensive training, you’ll discover the core principles and advanced techniques that make Go a standout language for building robust and high-performance applications.

What a student is expected to learn

• Comprehensive Introduction: Gain a solid understanding of Go’s syntax, data types, control flow, and package management system.
• Go Tools: Get to know the tool chain for building, testing, benchmarking, and profiling your programs.
• Effective Error Handling: Discover Go’s approach to error handling and techniques for creating robust, failure-resistant code.
• Testing: Use the standard library package and other community favorites along with advanced techniques for testing.
• Benchmarking: Take advantage of built-in performance optimization tools.
• Generics: Understand how to leverage parametric polymorphism to remove boilerplate from your code.
• HTTP Servers and Clients: Learn how to write resilient servers and clients along with techniques such as throttling and backoff.
• Concurrency: Learn how to use goroutines, channels, and how thread synchronization works. Leverage techniques such as worker pools, semaphores, and pipelines to take full advantage of Go concurrency.
• Dependency Management: Go beyond the standard library to work with third-party packages securely. You’ll publish your own packages, learn to isolate your CI build from repository outages, and more.
• OpenTelemetry: Build observable Go applications by instrumenting them to emit traces and metrics.

Some of what you’ll work on during the workshop

• Build command line tooling
• Build a REST API with a Database
• Write a Highly-Concurrent Port Scanner
• Write a Load Balancer
• Build a URL Shortener and deploy with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB
• Work with Large Language Models (LLMs) in your projects

Prerequisites

• Complete the Go Tour
• Browse through Go by Example
• Introduce yourself to OpenTelemetry (optional but recommended)
• Introduce yourself to LLMs concepts

Preparation

• Have a GitHub account
• Have an OpenAI account
• Have an AWS account and the awscli configured locally (the services we use will fit comfortably with the free tier AWS provides)
• Install Docker
• Have a functioning Go environment installed with Go 1.22 or later
• Use an editor/IDE with Go plugin installed