🐹 Go Backend Development

Go philosophy

Prefer the stdlib + small libraries over big frameworks. Explicit over magic. This is the opposite mindset from Spring, and knowing both makes you a stronger engineer.

Stack choices (learn the default well; know the alternatives)

Concern	Default	Alternatives
HTTP routing	net/http (1.22+ patterns) or chi	gin, echo, fiber
DB driver	pgx	database/sql
Queries	sqlc (SQL → type-safe Go)	GORM (know it, but avoid in hot paths), sqlx, ent, bun
Migrations	goose or golang-migrate / atlas
Config	env + caarlos0/env or koanf	viper
Logging	log/slog	zap, zerolog
Validation	go-playground/validator
gRPC	grpc-go + buf / connect-go
GraphQL	gqlgen
Kafka	franz-go	confluent-kafka-go, segmentio/kafka-go
Redis	go-redis	rueidis
Testing	stdlib + testify + testcontainers-go
Observability	OpenTelemetry Go SDK + Prometheus client
DI	manual constructor wiring	wire, fx

Checklist

• Project structure: cmd/, internal/ (by domain), not “Java-style” layered packages
• Handler → service → repository with interfaces at the consumer side
• Middleware: logging, recovery, request ID, auth (JWT validation via JWKS), CORS, rate limiting
• Graceful shutdown (signal.NotifyContext, server.Shutdown)
• Timeouts everywhere (http.Server Read/Write/Idle timeouts, context.WithTimeout for DB/HTTP calls)
• Transactions with pgx; optimistic locking; SELECT … FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED job queues
• Errors → HTTP status mapping; problem+json
• Health/readiness endpoints; Prometheus metrics; pprof endpoint (protected)
• Integration tests with testcontainers-go

🧪 Labs (🟢 warm-up → 🟡 core → 🔴 hard → ⚫ boss)

• 🟢 chi + pgx + sqlc + slog service with graceful shutdown
• 🟡 Middleware chain: request ID, logging, recovery, auth, rate limit (Decorator)
• 🔴 orbit-llm-gateway: provider adapters, SSE streaming passthrough, Lua quotas, fallback
• 🔴 A SKIP LOCKED job queue with leases + heartbeats
• ⚫ k6 + pprof: find and remove the top hotspot; show before/after flame graphs

🧠 Cognitive tasks

• Predict → verify: gateway overhead at p99 with 500 concurrent streams
• Trade-off debate: sqlc vs GORM for the engine’s hot paths

🛰️ Orbit integration

• orbit-engine, orbit-worker, orbit-llm-gateway, orbit-hooks, and orbit-stream

Go deeper

⚙️ Go Runtime Internals · Network Stack Internals · 🧩 Concurrency Patterns

Resources

• Let’s Go + Let’s Go Further (Alex Edwards) ⭐ · 100 Go Mistakes ⭐
• sqlc.dev, pgx docs, buf.build docs, connectrpc.com
• Ardan Labs Service repo (production service structure)