With the first leg of my journey with Go done (starting from a very rudimentary base), the next step for me was to bring it into my current area of interest and work - Apache Kafka.

👉 A Tour of Go : sync.Mutex

In the previous exercise I felt my absence of a formal CompSci background with the introduction of Binary Sorted Trees, and now I am concious of it again with learning about mutex. I’d heard of them before, mostly when Oracle performance folk were talking about wait types - TIL it stands for mutual exclusion!

I’ve been playing around with the new SerDes (serialisers/deserialisers) that shipped with Confluent Platform 5.5 - Protobuf, and JSON Schema (these were added to the existing support for Avro). The serialisers (and associated Kafka Connect converters) take a payload and serialise it into bytes for sending to Kafka, and I was interested in what those bytes look like. For that I used my favourite Kafka swiss-army knife: kafkacat.

A Tour of Go : Goroutines was OK but as with some previous material I headed over to Go by example for clearer explanations.

👉 A Tour of Go : Exercise: Images

This is based on the Picture generator from the Slices exercise.

👉 A Tour of Go : Readers

I’m not intending to pick holes in the Tour…but it’s not helping itself ;-)

For an introductory text, it makes a ton of assumptions about the user. Here it introduces Readers, and the explanation is good—but the example code looks like this:

👉 A Tour of Go : Exercise: Errors

Like Interfaces, the Tour didn’t really do it for me on Errors either. Too absract, and not enough explanation of the code examples for my liking. It also doesn’t cover the errors package which other tutorial do. I’m not clear if that’s because the errors package isn’t used much, or the Tour focusses only on teaching the raw basics.

👉 A Tour of Go : Interfaces

This page really threw me, for several reasons:

👉 A Tour of Go : Function Closures

So far the Tour has been 🤔 and 🧐 and even 🤨 but function closures had me 🤯 …

Each of the words on the page made sense but strung together in a sentence didn’t really make any sense to me.