https://blog.turboawesome.win/series/go-idioms/ Recent content in Go-Idioms on Bits, Trades & Systems Hugo en-us Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:15:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2025/10/migrating-a-production-service-from-zap-to-slog-notes-from-the-trenches/ Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:15:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2025/10/migrating-a-production-service-from-zap-to-slog-notes-from-the-trenches/ log/slog landed in the standard library in Go 1.21, but most production services are still on zap or zerolog. Here is what an actual migration looks like: where slog wins, where zap still wins, and how to move incrementally without a big-bang rewrite. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2025/06/go-1.23-range-over-functions-what-its-for-and-what-it-isnt/ Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2025/06/go-1.23-range-over-functions-what-its-for-and-what-it-isnt/ Go 1.23 shipped range over functions — the ability to range over an iterator function rather than a slice, map, or channel. The feature is genuinely useful for a specific class of problems and genuinely misunderstood by engineers reaching for it in places where a slice works better. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/10/gos-race-detector-in-ci-catching-data-races-before-they-catch-you/ Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:35:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/10/gos-race-detector-in-ci-catching-data-races-before-they-catch-you/ Data races are among the hardest bugs to find and reproduce. Go's built-in race detector finds them automatically — if you run it. Here's how to integrate it into CI effectively and what to do when it fires. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/07/gos-net/http-building-production-http-servers-without-a-framework/ Wed, 05 Jul 2023 10:44:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/07/gos-net/http-building-production-http-servers-without-a-framework/ Go's standard net/http package is capable enough for most production workloads without a framework. What 'capable enough' means in practice, and the patterns for middleware, graceful shutdown, and observability. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/04/database-access-patterns-in-go-sqlx-pgx-and-when-to-use-an-orm/ Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:22:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/04/database-access-patterns-in-go-sqlx-pgx-and-when-to-use-an-orm/ The Go database access landscape — database/sql, sqlx, pgx, GORM, sqlc — each makes different tradeoffs. Here's what works for different use cases and why the common advice to avoid ORMs is sometimes right and sometimes not. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/01/writing-idiomatic-go/ Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2023/01/writing-idiomatic-go/ Idiomatic Go is not just stylistic preference — it reflects how the language is designed to be used. The patterns that experienced Go engineers reach for, and why they work better than the alternatives. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/11/structured-logging-in-go-slog-zerolog-and-what-actually-matters/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 10:58:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/11/structured-logging-in-go-slog-zerolog-and-what-actually-matters/ The Go ecosystem has converged on structured logging, but the choice of library and the conventions you adopt matter more than the specific API. Here's what structured logging should look like in a production Go service and why. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/08/memory-layout-in-go-structs-alignment-and-cache-performance/ Wed, 17 Aug 2022 10:03:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/08/memory-layout-in-go-structs-alignment-and-cache-performance/ Go's struct layout follows alignment rules that affect both memory consumption and cache performance. Understanding them matters more than most Go developers realise. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/05/opentelemetry-in-go-distributed-tracing-that-doesnt-get-in-the-way/ Tue, 31 May 2022 10:14:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/05/opentelemetry-in-go-distributed-tracing-that-doesnt-get-in-the-way/ OpenTelemetry standardised distributed tracing across languages and vendors. Here's what idiomatic OTel integration looks like in Go — and the parts that aren't obvious from the documentation. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/01/embedding-in-go-composition-over-inheritance-done-right/ Wed, 05 Jan 2022 10:08:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2022/01/embedding-in-go-composition-over-inheritance-done-right/ Go has no inheritance, but it has embedding — a composition mechanism that promotes methods to the outer type. Understanding what embedding actually does (and what it doesn't) prevents the common mistakes. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/11/building-reliable-pipelines-with-go-retry-circuit-breaker-and-backoff/ Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:41:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/11/building-reliable-pipelines-with-go-retry-circuit-breaker-and-backoff/ Every service that calls another service will eventually face failures. The patterns that contain those failures — retry with backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads — are not optional for production Go services. Here's how to implement them correctly. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/04/go-1.18-generics-real-use-cases-worth-the-complexity/ Wed, 07 Apr 2021 10:29:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/04/go-1.18-generics-real-use-cases-worth-the-complexity/ Go 1.18 shipped generics and the ecosystem immediately split between 'finally' and 'we didn't need this.' After using them in production code, here are the cases where generics genuinely simplify things and the cases where they add complexity for no gain. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/01/grpc-in-production-lessons-after-two-years/ Wed, 13 Jan 2021 14:55:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2021/01/grpc-in-production-lessons-after-two-years/ gRPC is a better default than REST for internal service communication. It's also a set of new problems you didn't have before. Two years of production experience. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/10/generics-are-coming-to-go-what-the-proposal-actually-solves/ Mon, 05 Oct 2020 11:13:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/10/generics-are-coming-to-go-what-the-proposal-actually-solves/ The generics proposal for Go landed in 2020 and the feature shipped in Go 1.18. Here's what the design was targeting, what it actually enables, and why the 'just use interface{}' crowd was always missing the point. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/08/gos-scheduler-gomaxprocs-work-stealing-and-why-it-matters/ Wed, 12 Aug 2020 10:27:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/08/gos-scheduler-gomaxprocs-work-stealing-and-why-it-matters/ Go's M:N scheduler is one of the reasons goroutines are cheap enough to use liberally. Understanding how it works changes how you reason about concurrency bugs and performance anomalies. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/07/building-a-high-throughput-event-pipeline-in-go-without-losing-your-mind/ Wed, 01 Jul 2020 14:30:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/07/building-a-high-throughput-event-pipeline-in-go-without-losing-your-mind/ Channels are Go's concurrency primitive, but a naive pipeline of goroutines and channels won't survive high throughput. The patterns that scale: batching, backpressure, worker pools, and knowing when to abandon channels entirely. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/04/profiling-go-services-in-production-with-pprof/ Wed, 01 Apr 2020 10:18:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/04/profiling-go-services-in-production-with-pprof/ Go's pprof tooling is built in, low-overhead, and more useful than most engineers realise. Here's how to capture CPU and memory profiles from production services and actually read what they tell you. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/03/go-benchmarks-writing-ones-that-actually-tell-you-something/ Tue, 17 Mar 2020 09:29:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/03/go-benchmarks-writing-ones-that-actually-tell-you-something/ Go's built-in benchmark framework is excellent, but it's easy to write benchmarks that measure the wrong thing — compiler optimisations, cache warming artifacts, or benchmark overhead rather than the code under test. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/02/context-propagation-in-go-deadlines-cancellation-and-tracing/ Wed, 19 Feb 2020 11:14:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/02/context-propagation-in-go-deadlines-cancellation-and-tracing/ Go's context package is one of the most important idioms in the language. Used well it enables clean cancellation and distributed tracing. Used poorly it becomes a magic bag of values that creates invisible dependencies. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/01/go-module-system-dependency-management-done-right-mostly/ Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:15:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2020/01/go-module-system-dependency-management-done-right-mostly/ Go modules replaced GOPATH in 1.11 and became the default in 1.16. The design is genuinely good — reproducible builds, minimal version selection, explicit dependencies. The rough edges are worth knowing in advance.