The Love-Hate Relationship with Go’s Errors I love Go. Its simplicity, performance, and concurrency model are fantastic. But if I’m being honest, I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with its error handling. The if err != nil pattern is beautifully explicit, but the errors themselves can feel… well, a bit plain. When an application is simple, a single error string is often enough. But as my projects grew, especially in distributed systems, I found myself needing more....
I’m excited to share the first release of Neon (v0.1.0), a personal project that grew out of my desire to simplify how I build REST APIs in Go. I’ve always loved Go’s standard library, and with the recent enhancements to http.ServeMux in Go 1.22, I saw an opportunity to create a lightweight, zero-dependency framework that felt both powerful and distinctly “Go.” The “Why” Behind Neon I built Neon to solve a problem I kept running into: writing the same boilerplate for every new API....
I spent a good chunk of an afternoon wrestling with TLS certificates and Docker networking to get a secure, multi-node CockroachDB cluster running on my local machine. I’m writing this down mostly so I don’t have to figure it out all over again, and hopefully, it saves you some time too. The main takeaway? It’s totally doable, and it’s a great way to experiment with a distributed SQL setup. Also, you will almost certainly mess up a SAN (Subject Alternative Name) in a certificate at least once....
Repo: Neon on GitHub I’ve always been fascinated by how a little bit of structure can make code feel so much cleaner. That’s the idea behind Neon, a small REST framework I built for Go. I wanted to see if I could use struct tags to define API routes and middleware, turning what’s usually a block of repetitive code into something more declarative and, honestly, more fun. The Magic of Struct Tags The core idea of Neon is to use struct tags to attach metadata to your HTTP handlers....
I’ve always found that the best way to understand a technology is to build something with it. This post is my attempt to distill the process of creating a simple gRPC service in Go into a straightforward, no-frills guide. We’ll build a basic Calculator service that can multiply two numbers—a “hello world” for RPC. The “Why” I wanted a clear, practical example to refer back to. Something that cuts through the noise and focuses on the core steps: defining the service, generating the code, and getting a client and server to talk to each other....
Protocol Buffers (or Protobuf) are one of those technologies that I’ve come to appreciate more and more over time. At first glance, they can seem a bit more complex than good old JSON, but once you get the hang of them, they offer a powerful way to structure and serialize data. This post is a quick, hands-on guide to getting started with Protobuf in Go, based on my own experience....