Learning Resources for Full-Stack Developers

Go

Our backends are almost completely written in Go. There is not that much to learn if you are new to Go. The language is pretty small and will not change in the coming years since there is a backwards compatibility agreement.

The following resources should be looked at in the given order. They build upon each other and most of them can be done completely without installing Go on your local machine.

• https://go.dev/tour/welcome/1 No need to install Go. This tour of all important Go language features can be done online.
• https://go.dev/doc/effective_go The “Effective Go” guide introduces a lot of Go idioms, patterns, conventions and philosophies.
• https://go.dev/doc/faq Right about now you should have a lot of questions because other languages do things most of the time differently. The official FAQ should answer all your questions.
• https://go.dev/doc/install Now is the time to install Go on your local machine. This guide will walk you through the installation.
• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/IDEsAndTextEditorPlugins This list will give you a hint which editors and IDEs are supporting Go.

At this point you are ready to code but there is still a lot to learn. The following resources will give you a better understanding of the language, common conventions and patterns.

• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments Google’s official conventions for coding in Go. These are basically also the official convention for all Go community projects.
• https://go.dev/talks/2014/names.slide#1 Go is simplistic when it comes to naming things. Naming things is hard and there are a lot of conventions around naming things in Go.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV9rvDllKEg&ab_channel=gnbitcom Rob Pike’s talk “Concurrency Is Not Parallelism”: the holy grail when it comes to explaining goroutines and concurrency.
• http://devs.cloudimmunity.com/gotchas-and-common-mistakes-in-go-golang/ Includes a lot of useful gotchas and solutions.
• https://go.dev/talks/2015/tricks.slide#1 Describes some advanced Go usages.
• https://github.com/bradfitz/talk-yapc-asia-2015/blob/master/talk.md Shows basic profiling and benchmarking. Also, the memory basics of some Go types are discussed.
• https://go.dev/talks/ Every talk of the official Go team. Leave out the “How Go was made” (and such) talks since they are just there to talk about the Go history and that might be not interesting at all if you are not a pure Go fanboy/-girl.
• https://go.dev/blog/ The official Go blog with tons of explanations, conventions, patterns, philosophies and introduction to new features.
• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Learn Official additional learning resources.
• https://go.dev/ref/spec The whole specification of the Go language. If you read this, you will be a superfly Go programmer or at least know everything about the language.
• https://go.dev/ref/mem The memory model of the Go language.
• http://research.swtch.com/ A lot of in-depth blog posts about the Go language of one of the creators.
• https://go.dev/play/ Online playground for Go, execute and share Go code.

Kubernetes

We use Kubernetes to deploy and manage every service of our products. This gives us the flexibility to deploy our products in every available cloud and in bare-metal infrastructure. Since we are foremost working on a product that gets deployed, it is most important to understand the basics of Kubernetes (pods, deployments, services and configurations) instead of installing a cluster from the ground up.

• https://kubernetes.io/ Just the start page gives a great overview of everything that is possible with Kubernetes.
• https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/ This tour gives a great overview of the basic terminology and usage of Kubernetes.