I have been a software dev for 10+ years, but learned Golang recently.

A big moment for me was when I started remixing parts of multiple open source projects into my own little project soup.

By the way, I’m being ethical here: Projects were MIT licensed, I am not selling anything I made this way, etc.

Anyway, the Project soup:

• Built from the ground up
• Know exactly how it works
• “Stolen” code integrated as modules
• Project setup did not become a mess
• Still compiles super fast

I think this is an example where many of the strengths of Golang come together in a beautiful way, and will try to shine some light on what made it possible for me to do this.

1 Go developers actually KISS

(Keep It Super Simple)

In Golang, there many things the language designers intentionally saved you from:

• Doing Object Oriented Programming with classes
• Deciding where to handle Exceptions
• Extreme use of the type system
• Doing too much on one line of code
• Fiddling with code formatting

But!
There is also things that would be allowed, but Golang developers seem to avoid:

• Lots of abstractions piled on top of each other
• Extremely function flavored programming
• Bad use of libraries
• Overusing generics

The reasons for why Golang devs do not tend to do these things are probably complex.

I believe Golang attracts pragmatic developers that align with the goals and vibes of the language and prioritizing “getting shit done” over many other things, as well as KISSing.

Golang also changes the developers mindset to some degree by the errors and warnings the compiler emits. It does a good job of severly discouraging many practices without making them completely impossible. I would argue this is relevant, it certainly worked for me, and is a cool use of nudging. If ever there was a population that needed to be nudged, it is software developers.

Anyway, the absence of these practices is wonderful, and it is the most important piece for making the project soup possible, because reading other peoples code is not a cognitive nightmare! Hooray.

2 Nice Standard Library, Bro

I think the golang stdlib strikes a difficult balance very well. It embodies the KISS culture I was talking about while offering most of the things a golang user needs to do most of the time, and doing them well enough.

While I acknowledge various criticisms of it, developers did not feel the need to use a bunch of competing alternative standard libraries all over their code base (like in JS).

Notably neither the language itself, nor the golang stdlib has also not been fucked up by big changes to the language. I do not care how big the flaws in your language or stdlib are: If you make breaking changes, it is almost always a horrible trap. Just leave it alone.

Golang has been super careful to avoid this horrible trap. Thank you.

3 The Modules / Library system does not suck

The way imports/modules work is clear, debugging them is intuitive, and nothing major about them is messed up. If this sounds like table stakes to you, well, I wish you the best of luck with other languages.

Tips

• I used some of the replace github.com/foo => ./foo syntax in my go.mod files so that I could develop two separate projects in tandem. This is awesome.

• Take note of the go vendor command, which automates the annoying work of cloning package manager dependencies into your own source code.

The end!

I could ramble about cool Golang things more, but writing this is taking too much time.

PS

If you are trying out Golang, and annoyed about “unused variables” being a compiler error: This rule exists because of how error handling works in golang. It makes sense, don’t let it stop you from trying out this language :)

I think we need some sort of website that tracks the current enshittification status of popular companies.

Consider this example:

Expanding on: Somebody else’s problem

Let’s take our example of Microsoft Excel.

• If you run your own small business, you can escape it with no problems. Use whatever you like instead.
• If you need to edit MS Excel sheets that people send you, you could try using onlyoffice. Do not tell them about it and see if anything major breaks. Play a bit dumb if needed.
• If you are in a big company and forced to use it, deal with it proactively. Find all the tricks to create a smooth running operation for yourself in the fossilized layers of “poo”. There is no shame in this!

Unshittifiable products

Nextcloud has its flaws, but it syncs my stuff just fine. For almost ten years. Similar to Dropbox, they released a flurry of enterprise features to help sell it to governments agencies and businesses.

But you know what? They did not start nagging their end users. Their incentives are not aligned in this way, because they are not an incredibly overvalued SV company that suddenly feels the need to squeeze their 300M users for all they are worth “because oops I guess we need start making a lot of money right now”.

By the way, I would like to praise any government agency buying services from Nextcloud, because they are following the crucial rule of not buying closed source products as a government agency. Such products will inevitably turn into an enterprise-grade leech that sucks up too much tax money (due to game theory reasons).

And yes, open source to the rescue: If Nextcloud tried to do that, somebody would fork the project and release a guide on how to deploy NextNextCloud, and the bosses of the affected users could hire some consultants to replace their Nextclouds, and everything would be completely fine.

Summary

Microsoft bad, Open Source good

Many of us have used the bootstrap CSS framework over the years. It’s not the hotness anymore, but my management decided we should continue to use it, went on that website and bought a theme for ~100$.

Next, there was business a requirement for changing the primary color of the theme. The theme does not expose CSS variables for tweaking the colors (or anything useful). This feels wrong to me.

I proceeded by replacing the color values that I need to customize in _variables.scss, then tried to build the theme using the build process they had documented and the gulp script they had shipped in the repo. But it sucked a lot:

• Install was a pain, correct NPM version not documented, install did not work, had to coax the install to the point of basically rebuilding it from scratch.
• Grunt scrip theoretically offers live reload, but not feasible, because whatever garbage JS libraries they used are leaking gigabytes of memory and rebuilding from scratch, which takes absolutely forever
• A bunch of Docs/JS crap is included in the gulp script, there is no task to just build the CSS, I had to do that myself.
• Grunt script is shoddily made, saves two copies of everything it builds, does not clean properly, resulting in deleted stuff ghosting around in the final build

So this was not great. The way forward is obviously adding CSS variable support myself, so that we can get rid of this build process forever. So I tried injecting CSS variables as color values, but they are using SCSS color transform functions that make this fail.

As soon as I finally finish this hassle at work, I will publish the diffs for doing transform on top of a themed bootstrap 4.X build, in case I ever need to do this again in my next job, and in case it helps somebody.

For the real-time autocomplete, I turned away from HTMX, because while server round trips for the main input boxes of an app are feasible, the resulting experience would not be good.

I wanted people to be able to play this game on the train etc. without any kind of lag. So I wrote some vanilla Javascript that fetches the country list and displays the autocomplete box.