Why I’m switching from Go to JavaScript

After 13 years of writing Go code, I’m finally ready to move on.

Go is a great language and I’ve really enjoyed working with it. It has been my go-to language for writing APIs and server side code for a long time, but as I write more and more front-end code in JavaScript, I’ve really taken a liking to it. JavaScript was absolute shit a decade ago, I used to make fun of it all the time and I wasn’t the only one (wat?). But it’s come a long way since then and I dare say, it’s actually a pretty decent language now.

Almost exactly 11 years ago I wrote about my transition from Ruby to Go, so I guess about every decade I need a good language refresh to stay interested.

Some background on my time with Go

My previous company was one of the first companies to use Go in production, if not THE first besides Google, and we had great success with it. The company was a cloud infrastructure provider and we built our business on Go. It made a lot of sense for what we were building and I would probably still use it if I were building mission critical cloud infrastructure. But I’m not.

In the early days of Go, it was fun and exciting. It felt like everyone was using it as it was the era of new cloud services. This was right after Amazon EC2 came out and a plethora of new cloud services popped up.

Some highlights of my time with Go:

• We were the first company to post a job for a Go…