A Case Study on Handling Probabilistic Increments in Large-Scale Systems 🎲 — Let’s face a hypothetical scenario. You work at Docker as a software engineer in the registry team. Every time somebody in the world does a docker pull of a given image, a system that increments a counter for this image. The rationale? …

Go offers a few excellent diagnostics tools to help us get insights into how an application performs. This post focuses on the most important ones: profiling and the execution tracer. Both tools are so important that they should be part of the core toolset of any Go developer who is…

TL;DR: The slice length is the number of available elements in the slice, whereas the slice capacity is the number of elements in the backing array, counting from the first element in the slice. It’s pretty common for Go developers to mix slice length and capacity or not understand them…

TL;DR: A map can always grow in memory; it never shrinks. Hence, if it leads to some memory issues, you can try different options, such as forcing Go to re-create the map or using pointers. When working with maps in Go, we need to understand some important characteristics of how…

TL;DR: To be a proficient developer, you must acknowledge that concurrency isn’t always faster. Solutions involving parallelization of minimal workloads may not necessarily be faster than a sequential implementation. Benchmarking sequential versus concurrent solutions should be the way to validate assumptions. A misconception among many developers is believing that a…

In general, we should never guess about performance. When writing optimizations, so many factors may come into play that even if we have a strong opinion about the results, it’s rarely a bad idea to test them. However, writing benchmarks isn’t straightforward. It can be pretty simple to write inaccurate…

After almost three years of work, I wanted to announce that my book, 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, has finally been released 🎉. 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them shows you how to replace common programming problems in Go with idiomatic, expressive code. In it…

Generics is a fresh addition to the language. In a nutshell, it allows writing code with types that can be specified later and instantiated when needed. However, it can be pretty easy to be confused about when to use generics and when not to. …

In 2019, I published a post called The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes I’ve Seen in Go Projects. As the name states, it was a way to explain some of the most common mistakes made by Go developers. This post was pretty much popular (at least for me), and I…