Go has a strong house style that experienced practitioners converge on. Some of it is enforced by gofmt and golint. The rest is transmitted through code reviews, the standard library, and writing enough Go to feel the natural grain of the language. After several years of Go, here are the patterns that mark idiomatic code and why they work. ...
We had an incident that took down pricing for 23 minutes during the London open. High severity, real monetary impact, humbling root cause: a configuration value that worked in staging silently didn’t apply in production due to an environment variable naming collision. The postmortem process that followed was one of the better-run ones I’ve participated in. Here’s what made it useful. ...
On-call has a bad reputation in software engineering, and often deservedly so. Being paged at 3am for an alert that didn’t need to wake anyone is demoralising. Being on-call for systems you didn’t build, don’t understand, and can’t fix is terrifying. Being paged multiple times a night for weeks is a health risk. But on-call done well is a powerful practice. It creates direct feedback between the reliability of what you build and the experience of carrying it. When engineers are responsible for their own systems, they ship more reliable systems. Here’s the version that worked at the European fintech firm. ...
The team I joined was called “platform engineering.” The mandate was loosely: make other engineering teams faster. The first three months were spent understanding what “faster” meant, which was more contentious than expected. ...
Every engineering team has a roadmap. Most engineering roadmaps are wrong. Not in a surprising way — in a predictable way that reflects structural problems in how they’re created. After doing roadmap planning at two companies at different scales, here’s what I think actually works and why most roadmaps fail. ...
Go’s lack of inheritance is deliberate. The Go designers observed that inheritance hierarchies tend to create tight coupling and fragile base classes — problems that composition avoids. Embedding is Go’s tool for composition: you can embed one type in another and promote its methods, without inheritance’s downsides. It’s more powerful and more subtle than it appears. ...
The term “technical debt” was coined by Ward Cunningham specifically as a financial metaphor. Debt isn’t inherently bad — it’s a tradeoff: you get something now in exchange for a future obligation. When the metaphor is understood, the management of technical debt becomes clearer. When the moral framing replaces the financial one, it becomes a guilt-driven cycle that helps nobody. ...
Over two years running engineering hiring at the firm, we made about twenty senior engineering hires. Some were transformative — engineers who raised the quality of everything they touched. Some were neutral — competent contributors who did what was asked and not much more. A few were net negatives. Looking back, the correlation between interview performance and outcome was weaker than I’d expected. The things that predicted good hires were visible in the interview, but we weren’t consistently measuring them. ...
Go 1.18 was still months away when the design was finalised, but the proposal was public and we were already prototyping. After building several services at the European fintech firm with the experimental toolchain, the pattern of when generics help versus when they don’t was becoming clear. The answer is not “always use generics” or “avoid them.” It’s more specific than that. ...
The fintech startup started using RFCs (Request for Comments documents) when we hit seven engineers and decisions stopped being made naturally in conversation. Before RFCs, we’d build something, present it, discover disagreement, and partially rewrite. The disagreement was always there — we just discovered it late. RFCs in theory: write down what you’re proposing before building it, get feedback, align, then build. RFCs in practice, initially: long documents that people didn’t read, discussions that went in circles, and decisions that weren’t really made. The format that fixed it took six months to evolve. ...