One Year of Go

The Start

While I'm sure there are more qualified people out there to give recommendations and suggestions on how to best get started with Go, there is one resource that I keep recommending to everyone: 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them . I can't overstate how positive an influence this book has been for me and how much of a head start it gave me. Take this from someone who generally isn't too keen on reading technical books.

The Positives

I'll keep it quick and to the point—some of the things I've enjoyed about Go and its ecosystem over the past year:

• Simplicity: Coming from Node.js/TypeScript where one codebase can look completely upside-down compared to the next, Go repos just look all the same, relatively speaking. There is usually one idiomatic way of doing things, and the standard library gets you mostly there. Bye bye JS framework flavor of the week.
• Stability: I can barely remember the last time I had a Dependabot update and something actually broke. And when it did, it was a major version with relevant release notes. Go updates are painless, given the promise of no breaking changes.
• Improvements: After mentioning how stable something is, one could expect it comes at the expense of improvements being shipped. But it doesn't feel like that's the case. Shipped with Go 1.24, there is now a great built-in way of dealing with tools, and with the upcoming 1.25 the synctest feature is coming out of the "experimental phase"—just to mention a couple of awesome improvements.

The Negatives

On the flip side, there are of course some negatives as well:

• Zero Initialization: I'm sure some smart people have really good arguments about this. But so far I can't wrap my head around why this is the way to go (pun intended).
• Mocking: Writing interfaces for the sole purpose of having a way of mocking them—using a 3rd party package. I don't think I need to elaborate.
• Rawness: Some things could just use a fresh coat of paint to make them a bit more user-friendly right out of the box. One thing that comes to mind specifically is the go test output. The raw out-of-the-box experience is just not good. Luckily there is the gotestsum package.

GopherCon EU 2025

Finally, I also had the chance to visit GopherCon EU this year, and it's an experience I can wholeheartedly recommend. Lots of interesting talks, passionate people, and all in all just great vibes.