Over the past few weeks, I posted a couple of my Go-related blog posts to the r/golang subreddit. I don’t usually do this but have been asked the question numerous times: why don’t you share your writing anywhere? Honestly, I don’t know the true answer. Anxiety? Fear of criticism? Worried about wasting people’s time? Regardless of the reason, I did end up posting a few and I think it went okay!

Solid Start Link to heading

I first shared my recent post about Parsing Recursive Polymorhpic JSON. This was one received super well! It was fun post to write and I think it has a nice, practical flow. Some folks found it interesting and one user even said:

Thank you for writing! This helped my problem :)

Now that feels great to hear. If my writing can help even one other development make progress, then I’m happy. I mainly write these posts to solidify my own learning, but adding value to others is a nice bonus.

Mixed Middle Link to heading

The second blog I posted was an older one called Conditional Embedding in Go. I feel like the reception here was a bit more mixed. While some folks “nodded” and mentioned how they follow a similar approach, other readers were left somewhat confused. To summarize their question: why not just use the built-in vite dev server to host the frontend and let Go handle only the backend (while developing locally)? This is a fair question and it made me pause and ask myself: wait, why didn’t I just do that?

I think that, at the time, my goal was to unite the code paths between local and production (and avoid proxying, probably). Instead of using two different servers for local development and embedding the frontend’s static files only in prod, why not just always use the latter approach (with a small twist for picking up local changes). Did I get bit tunnel-visioned on that specific facet of the problem? Maybe, but I still prefer my “conditional embedding” strategy at the end of the day.

Foggy Finish Link to heading

When readers are critical, my gut reaction is to be defensive or delete the post altogether. However, after some consideration, I realize that the reality isn’t so bleak. After all, 2024 is the year of balance. What I realized what twofold: perhaps they don’t fully understand the exact nature of the problem I was solving and perhaps I don’t understand their experience and knowledge. We should probably all listen, ask questions, and eventually meet in the middle.

P.S. Link to heading

Also, my wife and I just bought a house! Since then, I’ve been very busy fixing things, cleaning, and painting. It has been a great mix of effort and reward. Who knew houses had so many walls, doors, and sections of trim??