Error handling in Go is uniquely designed to be explicit in the intent. You should return possible errors from functions and check/handle those returns. This, in contrast with other programming languages, might seem verbose and unfriendly, but it isn’t really so. Let’s go over some basic examples and move on to something less trivial.

Every day, or every few days at the least, somebody comes on /r/golang and asks something along the lines of “Which framework is the best?”. I think we should attempt to ask this question, at least in a way that’s easy to understand. You shouldn’t use a framework.

Writing elegant or readable code is a driving force for some programmers that have been around long enough to know that less code is usually better than more. We also know that less code is usually also less efficient than more, for various reasons. Depending on how you like your cat skinned, there are several ways to do things.

Go has a very strong standard library, and one of the most used parts of it is the net/http package, which provides structures that make development of HTTP servers and clients very straightforward. There are a few edge cases, where a deeper understanding of the http and related packages is very welcome.

Parsing strings would arguably be one of the more basic operations that one can do in any language. Sometimes, this may mean comma separated values from an user input on a web page, it may mean parsing application arguments from os.Args, or parse some line based input like lines from an IRC chat, Slack, Discord or some other chat system for a bot.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been developing Pendulum editor as part of the #100DaysOfCode challenge, where one commits to writing code at least one hour per day. Pendulum is a web based editor which is great for editing simple text and Markdown files.