Building Microservices with Go

I'm following along Nick Jackson's Building Microservices with Go series on YouTube.

I love his style of teaching.

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Background

I started using Go since Apr 2021, but mostly with AWS SDK for Go V2 and Lambda in Go.

Come to think of it, my previous project was also a serverless one on AWS, but with Javascript.

So last time I developed commerical container-based system was around 2019-2020. And it was a monolith server backed by TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and of course, Kubernetes. We ran into the textbook Monolith Hell, a prevailing architecture struggle described in Chris Richardson's book Microservices Patterns. I'm reading this book by the way.

Goals

• learn more Go
• brush up building REST APIs
• learn gRPC
• last but not least: learn Nick Jackson's style of teaching

Logs

• 2021-09-12: init commit!
• 2021-09-12: ep-01 hello world http server
• 2021-09-14: ep-02 refactor to http handler modules. shut down server gracefully
• 2021-09-14: ep-03 basic REST api
• 2021-09-16: ep-04 basic REST api CRUD
• 2021-09-26: ep-05 use Gorilla Mux to bootstrap REST routes. it is very similar to express.js.
• 2021-10-02: ep-06 use Go validator to validate REST request input. it is a different approach from joi, where the validation rules are tied with HTTP handler middleware.
• 2021-10-04: ep-07 generate Swagger API docs.
• 2021-10-09: ep-08 generate API client from Swagger spec.
• 2021-10-09: ep-09 more gorilla handler/middleware.

Tricks

• auto-compile and re-start the server on file changes. unlike Javascript, Go community doesn't seem to have a go-to solution.

  # https://techinscribed.com/5-ways-to-live-reloading-go-applications/
  
  npx nodemon --exec go run main.go --signal SIGTERM

• run go tests recursively in all sub directories

  go test -v ./...

other references I read

• go channel

  • https://gobyexample.com/channels
  • https://gobyexample.com/channel-buffering

• go signal: https://gobyexample.com/signals

• Go Struct tag: I've been using it without knowing it has a name. I really like how easy it makes JSON parse/encode with data object

• json.Encoder

• Gorilla Mux: Gorilla Mux to Golang feels like Express.js to Node.js

• Gorilla hanlders: some logging middleware

• go test -v ./...: run go test recursively in all sub directories

• goswagger: Generates a swagger specification from annotated go code goswagger spec generation rules

• swagger ui: a more commonly used Swagger doc server

open questions

• Let's Go - Routing Requests: I wanted to do wildcard routing, i.e.: /products/*, it turned out I just needed to use /products/ with a slash at the end, it's Subtree Pattern

• how to merge 2 structs with same type: I wish I could have something equivalent to Javascript spread:

  c = {...a, ...b}

• fmt.Errorf vs errors.New: I'm still not quite clear, need to read this PDF