k6 is a modern load testing tool, building on Load Impact’s years of experience in the load and performance testing industry. It provides a clean, approachable scripting API, local and cloud execution, and flexible configuration.

Join Mat Ryer for a fun conversation with Kris Brandow, Angelica Hill, and Natalie Pistunovich about how these Gophers get work/life done in this crazy world! Expect to learn about work environment must-haves, communication tips & tricks, developer tool recommendations, and much more!

We are in a time where the open source tooling and developer story around Apple’s new M1 chip is all over our feeds. Among these was this interesting benchmark. It even highlights where a somewhat older Intel can still beat the M1, such as highly optimized crypto. In general, if your code relies on the Go parts more than native optimized code the M1 looks like a performance win.

Maddy Mail Server implements all functionality required to run an email server. It can send messages via SMTP (works as MTA), accept messages via SMTP (works as MX) and store messages while providing access to them via IMAP. In addition to that it implements auxiliary protocols that are mandatory to keep email reasonably secure (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS).

It replaces Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, OpenSPF, OpenDMARC and more with one daemon with uniform configuration and minimal maintenance cost.

IMAP storage is still in beta, but this is one to watch as it could dramatically simplify your infrastructure.

Monitoring and debugging distributed systems is hard. In this episode, we catch up with Kelsey Hightower, Stevenson Jean-Pierre, and Carlisia Thompson to get their insights on how to approach these challenges and talk about the tools and practices that make complex distributed systems more observable.

It’s just 18 commits deep at the time of logging, but when one of Go’s authors fires up a new project (and a refactoring tool at that), it’s worth following along to see what develops.

Just how raw is this effort? The README only states:

rf is an experimental refactoring tool. It is very much a work in progress. rf is incredibly rough and likely to be buggy and change incompatibly.

I gave the repo a quick cloneing to see what I could see, but go get failed due to a missing file reference so it’s definitely in a “wait and see” status unless you’re up for some hacking.

When we talk about improving a programming language, we often think about what features we would add. Things like generics in Go, async/away in JS, etc. In this episode we take a different approach and talk about what we would remove from Go to make it better.

Paul Smith (from “Obama’s Trauma Team”) tells us the tale of how Go played a big role in the rescuing and rebuilding of the HealthCare.gov website. Along the way we learn what the original team did wrong, how the rescue team kept it afloat during huge traffic spikes, and what they’ve done since to rebuild it to serve the people’s needs.

Tempo is cost-efficient, requiring only object storage to operate, and is deeply integrated with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki. Tempo can be used with any of the open source tracing protocols, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry. It supports key/value lookup only and is designed to work in concert with logs and metrics (exemplars) for discovery.

Add this to the incredibly impressive open source portfolio at Grafana Labs.

In this episode we discuss Mislav’s experience building not one, but two Github CLIs - hub and gh. We dive into questions like, “What lead to the decision to completely rewrite the CLI in Go?”, “How were you testing the CLI, especially during the transition?”, and “What Go libraries are you using to build your CLI?”

Track and vizualize your followers/notifications, your repo’s stars/forks/watchers/commits, issue states/assignees/labels, and more.

Run a single Go applications on x86 bare metal, written entirely in Go (only a small amount of C and some assembly), support most features of Go (like GC, goroutine) and standard libraries, also come with a network stack that can run most net based libraries.

The entire kernel is a go application running on ring0. There are no processes and process synchronization primitives, only goroutines and channels. There is no elf loader, but there is a Javascript interpreter that can run js script files, and a WASM interpreter will be added to run WASM files later.

Goroutines correspond to processes and channels are used for inter-process communication (IPC). Also it runs JavaScript ¯\(ツ)/¯

With Gophercon rapidly approaching, we go behind the scenes to find out what it takes to deliver the world’s largest Go conference.

Can’t find a job working in Go? Perhaps introducing your current team to Go is the solution. In this episode we talk about how Go was introduced at different organizations, potential pitfalls that may sabotage your efforts, some advice on how to convince your team and CTO to use Go and more.

From reading through the README, this seems like a nice balance between a full-blown ORM and hand-rolling all your own SQL. For example, this point from the The mapper function is the SELECT clause. section:

In sq whatever you SELECT is automatically mapped. This means you just have to write your query, execute it and if there were no errors, the data is already in your Go variables. No iterating rows, no specifying column scan order, no error checking three times. Write your query, run it, you’re done.

Bubble Tea is built with Go, but it’s based on the Elm Architecture so it might not seem very Go-like at first, but the author thinks hopes you’ll see past that and realize that many of Go’s idioms are at play as well.

Bubble Tea is in use in production and includes a number of features and performance optimizations we’ve added along the way. Among those is a standard framerate-based renderer, a renderer for high-performance scrollable regions which works alongside the main renderer, and mouse support.

bit is an experimental modernized git CLI built on top of git that provides happy defaults.

What is cloud native? In this episode Johnny and Aaron explain it to Mat and Jon. They then dive into questions like, “What problems does this solve?” and “Why was Go such a good fit for this space?”

In the past I’ve had some problems sharing my screen with coworkers using corporate chatting solutions like Microsoft Teams. I wanted to show them some of my code, but either the stream lagged several seconds behind or the quality was so poor that my colleagues couldn’t read the code. Or both.

That’s why I created screego. It allows you to share your screen with good quality and low latency. Screego is an addition to existing software and only helps to share your screen. Nothing else (:.

Test drive the demo right here.

Taco de Wolff:

This is about the fastest minifier for web formats and is written in Go. For example, it can minify JS files at about 25MB/s, which is orders of magnitude faster than existing solutions that are typically 100-300 kB/s. There is also a command line tool that can be incorporated in your setup easily.

In this episode we dive into teaching Go, asking questions like, “What techniques work well for teaching programming?”, “What role does community play in education?”, and “What are the best ways to improve at Go as a beginner/intermediate/senior dev?”

Go-Diagrams lets you turn this code:

d, err := diagram.New(diagram.Filename("app"), diagram.Label("App"), diagram.Direction("LR"))
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

dns := gcp.Network.Dns(diagram.NodeLabel("DNS"))
lb := gcp.Network.LoadBalancing(diagram.NodeLabel("NLB"))
cache := gcp.Database.Memorystore(diagram.NodeLabel("Cache"))
db := gcp.Database.Sql(diagram.NodeLabel("Database"))

dc := diagram.NewGroup("GCP")
dc.NewGroup("services").
    Label("Service Layer").
    Add(
        gcp.Compute.ComputeEngine(diagram.NodeLabel("Server 1")),
        gcp.Compute.ComputeEngine(diagram.NodeLabel("Server 2")),
        gcp.Compute.ComputeEngine(diagram.NodeLabel("Server 3")),
    ).
    ConnectAllFrom(lb.ID(), diagram.Forward()).
    ConnectAllTo(cache.ID(), diagram.Forward())

dc.NewGroup("data").Label("Data Layer").Add(cache, db).Connect(cache, db)

d.Connect(dns, lb, diagram.Forward()).Group(dc)

if err := d.Render(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Into that diagram 👇

duf does for du what htop did for top.

In addition to the eye candy output you see below, you can also call it with the --json flag and pass the output to other programmer-y things.

Brad Fitzpatrick returns to the show (last heard on episode 44) to field a mixed bag of questions from Johnny, Mat, and the live listeners. How’d he get in to programming? What languages did he use before Go? What’s he up to now that he’s not working on the Go language? And of course… does he have any unpopular opinions he’d like to share? 😏

A community Q&A special. You asked the questions, and we discussed them live on air. A few example questions include “When is it okay to use init?”, “When should we use constructors?”, and “How should Go code be structured?”