Go

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. — Segal’s Law Take this example: func validate(input string) (bool, error) { // Validation check 1 if input == "" { return false, nil } // Validation check 2 if isCorrupted(input) { return false, nil } // System check if err := checkUpstream(); err != nil { return false, err } return true, nil } This function returns two signals: a boolean to indicate if the string is valid, and an error to explain any problem the function might run into. ...

When testing Go code that spawns subprocesses, you usually have three options. Run the real command. It invokes the actual binary that creates the subprocess and asserts against the output. However, that makes tests slow and tied to the environment. You have to make sure the same binary exists and behaves the same everywhere, which is harder than it sounds. Fake it. Mock the subprocess to keep tests fast and isolated. The problem is that the fake version doesn’t behave like a real process. It won’t fail, write to stderr, or exit with a non-zero code. That makes it hard to trust the result, and over time the mock can drift away from what the real command actually does. ...

Object-oriented (OO) patterns get a lot of flak in the Go community, and often for good reason. Still, I’ve found that principles like SOLID, despite their OO origin, can be useful guides when thinking about design in Go. Recently, while chatting with a few colleagues new to Go, I noticed that some of them had spontaneously rediscovered the Interface Segregation Principle (the “I” in SOLID) without even realizing it. The benefits were obvious, but without a shared vocabulary, it was harder to talk about and generalize the idea. ...

Along with propagating deadlines and cancellation signals, Go’s context package can also carry request-scoped values across API boundaries and processes. There are only two public API constructs associated with context values: func WithValue(parent Context, key, val any) Context func (c Context) Value(key any) any WithValue can take any comparable value as both the key and the value. The key defines how the stored value is identified, and the value can be any data you want to pass through the call chain. ...

When it comes to test organization, Go’s standard testing library only gives you a few options. I think that’s a great thing because there are fewer details to remember and fewer things to onboard people to. However, during code reviews, I often see people contravene a few common conventions around test organization, especially those who are new to the language. If we distill the most common questions that come up when organizing tests, they are: ...

Go has support for subtests starting from version 1.7. With t.Run, you can nest tests, assign names to cases, and let the runner execute work in parallel by calling t.Parallel from subtests if needed. For small suites, a flat set of t.Run calls is usually enough. That’s where I tend to begin. As the suite grows, your setup and teardown requirements may demand subtest grouping. There are multiple ways to handle that. ...

I like to make the distinction between application structure and architecture. Structure is how you organize the directories and packages in your app while architecture is how different components talk to each other. The way your app talks to other services in a fleet can also be called architecture. While structure often influences architecture and vice versa, this distinction is important. This post is strictly about application structure and not library structure. Library structure is often driven by different design pressures than their app counterparts. There are a ton of canonical examples of good library structure in the stdlib, but it’s app structure where things get a bit more muddy. ...

With the advent of LLMs, the temptation to churn out a flood of unit tests for a false veneer of productivity and protection is stronger than ever. My colleague Matthias Doepmann recently fired a shot at AI-generated tests that don’t validate the behavior of the System Under Test (SUT) but instead create needless ceremony around internal implementations. At best, these tests give a shallow illusion of confidence in the system’s correctness while breaking at the smallest change. At worst, they remain green even when the SUT’s behavior changes. ...

At work, a common mistake I notice when reviewing candidates’ home assignments is how they wire goroutines to channels and then return early. The pattern usually looks like this: start a few goroutines each goroutine sends a result to its own unbuffered channel in the main goroutine, read from those channels one by one if any read contains an error, return early The trap is the early return. With an unbuffered channel, a send blocks until a receiver is ready. If you return before reading from the remaining channels, the goroutines writing to them block forever. That’s a goroutine leak. ...

Unlike pytest or JUnit, Go’s standard testing framework doesn’t give you as many knobs for tuning the lifecycle of your tests. By lifecycle I mean the usual setup and teardown hooks or fixtures that are common in other languages. I think this is a good thing because you don’t need to pick up many different framework-specific workflows for something so fundamental. Go gives you enough hooks to handle this with less ceremony. But it can still be tricky to figure out the right conventions for setup and teardown that don’t look odd to other Gophers, especially if you haven’t written Go for a while. This text explores some common ways to do lifecycle management in your Go tests. ...

No matter which language you’re writing your service in, it’s generally a good idea to separate your external dependencies from your business-domain logic. Let’s say your order service needs to make an RPC call to an external payment service like Stripe when a customer places an order. Usually in Go, people make a package called external or http and stash the logic of communicating with external services there. Then the business logic depends on the external package to invoke the RPC call. This is already better than directly making RPC calls inside your service functions, as that would make these two separate concerns (business logic and external-service wrangling) tightly coupled. Testing these concerns in isolation, therefore, would be a lot harder. ...

As your test suite grows, you need ways to toggle certain kinds of tests on or off. Maybe you want to enable snapshot tests, skip long-running integration tests, or switch between real services and mocks. In every case, you’re really saying, “Run this test only if X is true.” So where does X come from? I like to rely on Go’s standard tooling so that integration and snapshot tests can live right beside ordinary unit tests. Because I usually run these heavier tests in testcontainers, I don’t always want them running while I’m iterating on a feature or chasing a bug. So I need to enable them in an optional manner. ...

When working with Go in an industrial context, I feel like dependency injection (DI) often gets a bad rep because of DI frameworks. But DI as a technique is quite useful. It just tends to get explained with too many OO jargons and triggers PTSD among those who came to Go to escape GoF theology. Dependency Injection is a 25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept. _ — James Shore_ DI basically means passing values into a constructor instead of creating them inside it. That’s really it. Observe: ...

By default, Go copies values when you pass them around. But sometimes, that can be undesirable. For example, if you accidentally copy a mutex and multiple goroutines work on separate instances of the lock, they won’t be properly synchronized. In those cases, passing a pointer to the lock avoids the copy and works as expected. Take this example: passing a sync.WaitGroup by value will break things in subtle ways: func f(wg sync.WaitGroup) { // ... do something with the waitgroup } func main() { var wg sync.WaitGroup f(wg) // oops! wg is getting copied here! } sync.WaitGroup lets you wait for multiple goroutines to finish some work. Under the hood, it’s a struct with methods like Add, Done, and Wait to sync concurrently running goroutines. ...

Go 1.24 added a new tool directive that makes it easier to manage your project’s tooling. I used to rely on Make targets to install and run tools like stringer, mockgen, and linters like gofumpt, goimports, staticcheck, and errcheck. Problem is, these installations were global, and they’d often clash between projects. Another big issue was frequent version mismatch. I ran into cases where people were formatting the same codebase differently because they had different versions of the tools installed. Then CI would yell at everyone because it was always installing the latest version of the tools before running them. Chaos! ...

Ideally, every function that writes to the stdout probably should ask for a io.Writer and write to it instead. However, it’s common to encounter functions like this: func frobnicate() { fmt.Println("do something") } This would be easier to test if frobnicate would ask for a writer to write to. For instance: func frobnicate(w io.Writer) { fmt.Fprintln(w, "do something") } You could pass os.Stdout to frobnicate explicitly to write to the console: ...

While watching Mitchell Hashimoto’s excellent talk on Go testing, I came across this neat technique for deferring teardown to the caller. Let’s say you have a helper function in a test that needs to perform some cleanup afterward. You can’t run the teardown inside the helper itself because the test still needs the setup. For example, in the following case, the helper runs its teardown immediately: func TestFoo(t *testing.T) { helper(t) // Test logic here: resources may already be cleaned up! } func helper(t *testing.T) { t.Helper() // Setup code here. // Teardown code here. defer func() { // Clean up something. }() } When helper is called, it defers its teardown — which executes at the end of the helper function, not the test. But the test logic still depends on whatever the helper set up. So this approach doesn’t work. ...

There are primarily three ways of sorting slices in Go. Early on, we had the verbose but flexible method of implementing sort.Interface to sort the elements in a slice. Later, Go 1.8 introduced sort.Slice to reduce boilerplate with inline comparison functions. Most recently, Go 1.21 brought generic sorting via the slices package, which offers a concise syntax and compile-time type safety. These days, I mostly use the generic sorting syntax, but I wanted to document all three approaches for posterity. ...

Comparing interface values in Go has caught me off guard a few times, especially with nils. Often, I’d expect a comparison to evaluate to true but got false instead. Many moons ago, Russ Cox wrote a fantastic blog post on interface internals that clarified my confusion. This post is a distillation of my exploration of interfaces and nil comparisons. Interface internals Roughly speaking, an interface in Go has three components: A static type A dynamic type A dynamic value For example: ...

Middleware is usually the go-to pattern in Go HTTP servers for tweaking request behavior. Typically, you wrap your base handler with layers of middleware — one might log every request, while another intercepts specific routes like /special to serve a custom response. However, I often find the indirections introduced by this pattern a bit hard to read and debug. I recently came across the embedded delegation pattern while browsing the Gin repo. Here, I explore both patterns and explain why I usually start with delegation whenever I need to modify HTTP requests in my Go services. ...