In the last post we looked at fast, primitive encoding using strconv but in this post we’ll take a higher level approach by using templates with the fmt package. …

Formatting & parsing primitive values in Go is a common task. You probably first dipped your toes into the fmt package when you started Go, however, there’s a less commonly used package for basic formatting that’s more efficient and preserves compiler type checking. The strconv package is built for speed…

When you need to squeeze every last bit or CPU cycle out of your protocol, one of the best tools is the encoding/binary package. It operates on the lowest level and is built for working with binary protocols. …

For better or for worse, JSON is the encoding of the Internet. Its formal definition is small enough that you could write it on the back of a napkin but yet it can encode strings, numbers, booleans, nulls, maps, and arrays. …

So far we’ve covered working with raw byte streams and bounded byte slices but few applications simply shuttle bytes around. Bytes alone don’t convey much meaning, however, once we encode data structures on top of those bytes then we can build truly useful applications. This post is part of a…

Vendoring. Generics. These are seen as big issues in the Go community but there’s another issue that’s rarely mentioned — application package layout. Every Go application I’ve ever worked on appears to have a different answer to the question, how should I organize my code? Some applications push everything into…

In the previous post we covered byte streams but sometimes we need to work with bounded, in-memory byte slices instead. While working with a list of bytes seems simple enough, there are a lot of edge cases and common operations that make using the bytes package worthwhile. …

Go is a programming language built for working with bytes. Whether you have lists of bytes, streams of bytes, or individual bytes, Go makes it easy to process. From these simple primitives we build our abstractions and services. The io package is one of the most fundamental packages within the…

How I organize my tests in Go — The Purpose of Tests People argue over testing style, whether to use TDD or BDD, or whether tests are even useful at all. Before I get into how I structure my tests in Go, I should explain how I see tests. Tests should be 2 things: Self-contained Easily reproducible That’s it. They should be…