go podcast()

085: Morten received an ~acquisition offer, Dominic got his 1st paying customer

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 14 May 2026 05:00:00 -0400

It's sounds way bigger than what it is, for both of us frankly. But hey, we're using Go to try and generate a living out of our respective products and there's no small achievements. We talk about struggles of real-world life of trying and building a product enough people care about so we can continue our dreams of sustainability.

Of course this still involve Go since we both bet on Go for our products and our usual tangents. This format might be close to what go podcast() is evolving too. We're always looking to talk to Gophers, if you want to talk about something that passion you reach out. When there's no interview, well we go free-style talking about our products, our challenges and everything in between.

084: Databases, FTS, and local LLM

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:00:00 -0400

This week we talk about databases, full-text search and local llm. All of this with the usual tangents and what not.

083: Lisette, inspired by Rust, compiles to Go with Iván Ovejero

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

This week Iván Ovejero join me and we talk about Lisette, a nice programming language that's inspired by Rust and compiles to Go. Programming languages are the new JS framework these days it seems. I personally enjoy discovering new language, sometimes it clicks sometimes it don't. Go is a great language, but I'll admit that having a better type system, the exhaustive pattern match on enum, and a pipe operator to me feels like very nice to have / quality of life as Gophers. In any case, it's always great to talk to language creators, And who knows, maybe you'll want some excitement and try something new this week.

Links:

082: Streaming, product updates, and marketing

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Hey we talk about streaming programming session, some updates on our produicts, and challenges related to marketing.

Ho and Morten quit the call for a second time in a row, this streak has to stop ;).

081: Weird Redis bug and we talk text editors

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

I talk about a weird issue I'm having all of a sudden with Redis. VPS hosting in general, the famous 5 years mark for a server. Morten is using neovim, which I find very interesting, so we took an un-scripted tangent talking about text editors.

080: Ship it anyway: fighting the urge to refactor

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we dive into the dangerous "pre-launch purgatory"—that final stretch after reaching V1 but before the first paying customers arrive. It’s a period where the temptation to start over is at its peak, armed with all the lessons learned during the build. We discuss how to resist the urge to refactor your SaaS into oblivion and why shipping "imperfect" code is the only way to get the feedback you actually need.
In the second half, the conversation shifts to the challenges of maintainership. My co-host shares the hurdles he’s currently facing with his open-source project, Andurel. When you’re building in a vacuum without a clear signal from users, how do you decide which features matter? We explore the shared struggle of finding a "North Star" when the feedback loop is quiet and the roadmap feels uncertain.

079: WireGuard and don't mix social engagement w/ product validation

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

This week we talk about what's new with what we're working on. And as always we cover / comment what we've found intreesting or disturbing in the last week or so.

078: Uncloud, bridging the gap between Docker and Kubernetes

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0400

We talk to the author of Uncloud, a tool that helps with self-hosting and managing your own infrastructure / make it easy to deploy your services to your servers.

Links:

Uncloud on GitHub

077: LLMs, with great power comes great responsibility

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:14:25 -0400

Ramesh contacted me regarding what we've been saying lately in the pod regarding using LLM and some bad experiences we've had and maybe even some negativity etc. He wanted to give his perspective and experiences using LLMs, where it's working well for him and his team and give some tips regarding potential miss-use and what have been working good for him.

076: From nginx to Caddy and we both had LLM quality issues/concerns

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0400

We hop into the call and start recording, and what we found, we had both issues / concerns about quality of LLM produce code. Morten is reviewing some aspect of his project before releasing the public version and found some interesting thing that would make it hard to justify leaving them there. I had very similar issues, entering into a full refactor of a Go backend server I let the LLM cook for a rare time in Go, and decided at some point that enough is enough and decided to refactor the code.

It's not like it's big surprise, and I think we're a lot in that situation. When you truly start to review the code that is generated, let's just say that sometimes it's not the best work you'd have done yourself. It's quicker though, no question there. But at what cost.

I also finally ditched nginx and installed Caddy for my production servers.

075: Fyne apps are easier to design and build with Andy Williams

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Andy, the creator of the Fyne toolkit returns and talk about a new visual designer for Fyne apps and a service to make building to all platform very easy. We talk about the state of Fyne, AppTrix Andy's product and how it's now possible to use a visual designer to create Fyne UI if you're more of a visual person than defining the UI via code.

Links:

Fyne website
- AppTrix

074: Andurel got contributors and OSS licenses

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:16:27 -0500

We give an update on our respective projects and talk about the difficulties of changing license from MIT to LGPL once there's contributions to the project.

073: Heroku in maintenance mode and surfacing observability

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

This week we talk about multiple in-the-news topics like the SalesForce announcement that Heroku is in ~maintenance mode and we surface the big observability topic as I'm preparing to implement something basic for StaticBackend and since Morten already have this in his open source project we duscuss about ways to add this after the fct and some parts of tracing your system.

072: The tools we're using as Go SWE

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

This week we're talking about the tools we're using in our day-to-day as Go software engineers. Which tools we like, of course there's always the story driven aspect of go podcast(), so there's a couple of tangents here and there ;).

071: February projects updates

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:00:00 -0500

We're trying something, each first episode of the month we'll talk about our respective open source projects. This episode will be more story driven than others, and you'll be able to follow our journey maintaining open source Go projects.

Links:

Andurel Morten's project
StaticBackend Dominic's project

070: Morten, a new co-host; Discussing the current state of education and AI

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:31:42 -0500

Meet Morten, I said I wanted to try and bring co-hosts in 2026 to test how it feel to have co-hosts. We're starting this with a discussion on LLM and tech education and a little bit of education more extended. As someone that create courses we've all more or less felt a drop as AI and LLM are used in ~tech training or does people even still wants to get new skills and what not. It's a major concerns and like most people are realizing after using an LLM seriously, well let's just say that an expert is kind of very hard to replace, especially when it's time to learn new skills.

069: I'm having fun again! Un-archiving StaticBackend

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 05:29:13 -0500

I'm restarting this year after a small break, go podcast() turned 4 years which is crazy, although I'd have hope to have had a better consistency publishing episodes, it is what it is ;). I'm looking at bringing co-hosts from multiple background to add some diversity to the episodes, if you're intrigued please reach out.

I've also decided to un-archived and restart working on StaticBackend, my Go open source backend-as-a-service project I started in 2019. I'm missing the pace of working on a problem, thinking about it for some time and implementing a solution while adding tests etc. I've recorded this episode twice because the first time I kind of sliped into a more dark / negative mood, and that's not what I want for the pod and not how I'm feeling about bringing StaticBackend back.

Go's v1 "it will build" compatibility is underrated.

Links:

Please if you can talk about the podcast it would help greatly. You can always purchase my Go courses, which are 50% off for listeners: Build SaaS apps in Go | Build a Google Analytics in Go | Zero to Gopher

068: Revisiting Datastar with Delaney Gillilan

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 04:51:13 -0500

I asked Delaney Gillilan to return to go podcast() to revisit datastar, a very impressive tool that enable backend to push changes to the frontend of a web application. In episode 54 we covered the "what is datastar", in this episode I wanted to dive a little deeper since I personally finally started to jump and use the library in projects. I have been a dedicated user of HTMX and Alpine for a long time already and once I tried datastar I found myself capable of great interactions between the frontend and backend and mostly keep the state that made sense in the backend. It's hard to explain, you'd have to test it to realize it's true power.

Links:

Datastar website

If you'd want to support the show you may talk about it, join the Slack channel #gopodcast. You may also purchase my courses, always at 50% off for listeners of the show, my last course is Zero to Gopher.

067: LLM/AI as agents in your Go system with Markus Wüstenberg

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 05:00:00 -0500

This week I try to keep an open mind and we talk LLMs and AI with Markus Wüstenberg. Markus is a friend of the show and I noticed he was using a lot of LLM lately, I basically learn a lot by doing these podcast interviews, so I was interested to hear about what Markus is using LLM and AI in the systems he ships and also how does he uses AI as a software engineer in the day-to-day.

Personally my experience so far is very mixed, sometimes it's good other it's pretty frustrating with LLMs either integrating functionalities augmented by LLMs or trying to integrate a coding agent in my day-to-day, let's just say that I'm not there yet. But I wanted to hear about someone that do have real production experiences using these things, and Markus gives a solid fundation to demistified some aspects, at least for me ;).

Links:

As always if you're finding value in the pod talk about it, you may also purchase my courses, I launched Zero to Gopher 3 weeks ago, there's 50% off for listeners of the show.

066: Xp, CI, CD with Jon Barber

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 05:00:00 -0500

Jon helped a lot of teams improve their software engineer processes. We talk about the importance of testing, having sane Ci and CD pipeline, pairing and a lot of other extreme programing concepts.

Links:

If you'd like to support the show spread the words about it, join the slack channel #gopodcast, take a Patron subscription, purchase Zero to Gopher, my latest course.

065: We're in the 3rd age of SaaS

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:57:51 -0400

My desire to run a sustainable software business started somewhere near 2003 in the Business of Software forum. I've built, sold, and acquired a dozen of products since that time, with I have to admit the majority of failures.

I've seen three distincts era for software companies, we're definitably in the 3rd one, one that still has to be identified as good or bad.

Software companies, especially calm company is excruciably hard to be successful at. But when you're honest and define what is success to you and set out realistic goals, there's ways to succeed even without have $2m in ARR.

Go is of course a great choice to build a SaaS, but software product has almost zero to do with technology, especially at first and you'll most certainly end up rewriting to a v2 at some point after learning what the product really need to be. So the good old advice of use what you're most proficent in to write code is most often than not the correct answer.

I talk about my experiences trying to run a sustainable software company for the last 17 years.

Links:

My last course Zero to Gopher with a discount for listeners
Support the show on Patreon

As always if you can talk about the show it helps spread the words. If you'd like to talk about something you're passionate about related to Go please reach out. If you'd like to support the show you can purchase my courses and/or take a Patron subscription.

064: Podman, the root-less alternative to Docker

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:07:30 -0400

I retried Podman to replace a production service and did not wanted to re-installed Docker, mainly for security reasons. The fact that podman runs containers on the user-level and completely isolated from the system is a great alternative to the Docker deamon.

I'm trying something new for this episode, I'll try and get audio clips from people to add more dynamism to the episodes, if you can join the Slack channel and also I've started a Patreon if you want to chip in and help me keep the mic on.

Links:

My new course Zero to Gopher (50% off for listeners)
Blog post to view commands and the back story
Build SaaS apps in Go
Build a Google Analytics in Go

Please talk about the podcast, share the episode, join the slack channel. Purchasing my courses and Patron are great way to monetary support the show.

063: Common mistakes when testing with Jakub Jarosz

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Jakub is returning to the show, he's about to launch a book called "50 Go Testing Mistakes" and we talk about the most common mistakes Gophers are making when it testing. Having a trustable testing suite is known to be critical for long-live software system. I can testify having maintained a .NET codebase for 20 years without any tests, it sucks.

Links:

062: Your Go linters don't know how to fix your code

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:56:04 -0400

One university published attracted my attention, because it was on Go, it's titled: "Assessing Golang Static Analysis Tools on Real-World Issues".
Do you find your static analysis and linters tools could be more helpful when reporting issues?
I'm mixed feeling really, I think that they're pretty damn good. Tools can always improve for sure, not sure if we will need the help of LLMs to mix static analysis checks and LLM analysis / proposed fixes, maybe that will be the next step for those tools.

Links:

Paper's link

061: As a Gopher I'm excited about Gleam, maybe you'll too

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:17:28 -0400

I finally gave Gleam a serious look and ho boy I'm excited. I've looked at Gleam a long time ago back when it started with the ML-like syntax. I've always been an Elm fan, I discovered functional programming with Elm. Near 2016-2017 I tried Elixir and Phoenix, and gave it a try multiple times following the years, but I'm not fully sure why it never clicked completely for me.
As someone engage with Go for the last 10+ years, I won't lie that I was looking for some excitement lately. Not because I'm tired of Go or anything, I've dabbled seriously into Python/Django in the last 3-4 years. But Gleam, at least so far, as this I don't know what that I felt when I started Go back in 2014.
There's so many programming languages these days that I suppose it's really comes down to a matter of taste. I do have some minimal checkboxes that a language must checked before I even considered looking at it, and Gleam was checking them all. It's a refreshing language after 10 years of Go. Just another tool in the toolbox, but I'm extremely picky about which tool I put in my toolbox haha, so Gleam for now is in the evaluation phase, but so far I'm excited and I haven't felt like this for a long time.

060: 10x Developer, or 10x Distraction? A Reality Check on AI

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:59:16 -0400

The message is everywhere: LLMs are here to make us 10x more productive and change software development forever. Venture capitalists are pouring billions into the vision, and big tech companies are pushing hard for us to adopt the tools. But as a software engineer who’s seen the demos and lived the reality, something feels profoundly wrong.

This week, I’m taking a step back to reflect on the current state of our industry. We'll explore the inconvenient truth that often gets lost in the hype: that relying on AI can sometimes make us slower, introduce more technical debt, and even erode the fundamental skills that make us valuable.

But maybe the real problem isn't the technology itself. Maybe it's that we're looking for a quick fix for a deeper issue. Join me as we discuss what really drives developer productivity, the crucial importance of domain knowledge, and whether anyone is even considering the quality of life for the people building our systems.

Because while the "going from 0 to 1" demo is impressive, our jobs are about maintaining complex systems from 1 to 1000. And maybe, just maybe, an agentic flow that doesn't care about our codebase isn't the real solution we need.

p.s. And yes, I used LLM to improve my description draft ;)

059: Is Go over with John Arundel

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0400

Let's talk with a friend of the pod, John Arundel. We talk about state of thing a little regarding Go's maturity, a bit of AI, I personally am a bit fatigue of the noise and "agent". The podcast is returning slowly. , John has written a new Go book that's beginner-friendly, but goes deeper than you'd expect, he produce excellent learning and training resources.

Links:

The Deeper Love of Go
- John's newsletter

058: Starting in Go with Yann Bizeul

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Go is used by multiple programmers and software engineers. Lots of path can lead to want to try Go, and this week I talk with Yann whom eventually found Go and talks about his experiences writing internal tools at his company.

Links:

Hupload
- YBFeed

057: I unite with another technical professional, and we talk about being blind in tech (part 2)

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:02:44 -0400

The part 2 of my talk with Ivan Fetch. We cover the remaining listener questions and go over some aspects in more details of being blind in tech.

056: I unite with another technical professional, and we talk about being blind in tech

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:00:00 -0400

This week I'm joined by Ivan Fetch. We talk about challenges and day-to-day life as tech professionals being blind, using a screen reader. This is the part one as we've a lot to cover. Since I started this pod after telling guests I'm blind and use a screen reader everyone wants to know more, so I thought doing an episode would be interesting to people wanting to know more.

The best way to support the show is by talking about it and sharing the episodes. If you can you can buy my courses which help keeping the lights on for the efforts invested to bring the pod, there's a 50% off discount for listeners of this show: Build a SaaS app in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

055: Zog, a Go validation pkg with Tristan Mayo

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 05:00:00 -0400

This week I'm joined by Tristan Mayo, the creator of Zog, a Go library that helps with validation when receiving data from an HTTP POST or parsing data.

Links:

Zog on GitHub

054: Datastar with Delaney Gillilan

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:00:00 -0400

This week I talk with Delaney Gillilan, the creator of Datastar, a framework that helps building web applications with the reactivity of a single page app but with the programming model of a good old server-rendered page from the backend. Datastar combines the power of HTMX and Alpine.js in a simple and lightweight way.

Links:

Datastar website

The best way to support the show at this time is by talking about the pod and if you can, purchase my courses, which are at 50% discount for listeners of the show: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

053: My exp w/ Gomponent in prod with Markus Wustenberg

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 05:00:00 -0500

Markus is back to talk about Gomponent. I've used the library in production and wanted to tell the story of my experience converting my html/template to Gomponent and get his thoughts and reactions. This is more of a real-world episode than anything else, a real story of real usage of Gomponent.

Links:

Gomponent

As always the best way to help is by sharing and talking about the show. If you can you may contribute by purchasing my courses, this helps with all the efforts and costs of running a podcast, courses are at 50% off: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

052: Gost, a Go headless browser with Peter Strøiman

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 05:00:00 -0500

This week I'm joined by Peter Strøiman, the author of Gost, a Go headless browser that can be pretty useful when doing TDD and even (especially) if you're using HTMX. We talk about the challenges and the "why" Peter wanted to build this project, where it can be helpful and we dive into the internals a bit.

Links:

As always I'd appreciate if you can talk about the pod and if you can and want to support to cover cost the best way is to purchase my courses which are 50% off for listeners of the show: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

051: Event sourcing with Morgan Hallgren

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 05:00:00 -0500

This week I'm joined by Morgan Hallgren and we talk about Event Sourcing. Morgan created an open source library that helps with the parts involved when doing event sourcing.

Links:

eventsourcing library (GitHub)

As always the best way to support the show is by talking about it. If you'd want to chip in as it's time consuming and costly to host a podcast, the best way is to purchase my courses which listeners get 50% off: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

050: Security, devops, testing in Go with Jakub Jarosz

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 05:41:17 -0500

This week I'm joined by Jakub Jarosz and we talk about security, devops, testing a lot of topics that are fun and comfortable doing in Go.

Links:

As always I'd appreciate any mention about the podcast and reach out if you'd like to join as a guest. If you'd want to support the show you can purchase my courses at 50% off Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

049: I hate e2e tests, but I love unit tests

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:06:22 -0500

go podcast() is back. After debating about canceling or continuing the pod, I've took 2 months and decided to resume publishing episode. I'm looking at a formula for the 4th year of the podcast. I'll still do interviews with Gophers as much as I can. But to fill the gap, I'd like to have something special, maybe more story based that would allow me to publish regularely, like each week.

In this episode I talk mostly about how innevitably my integrations and e2e tests sucks and are borderline untrustable after sometimes.

If you'd like to record an episode as a guest reach out, these days I'm on BlueSky as @dominicstpierre.com

As always you can support the show by talking about it, sharing the links. You may also purchase my courses at 50% off: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go

048: Lea Anthony on Wails

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:28:30 -0500

I'm receiving Lea, creator of the Wails project. Allowing Gophers to build desktop application using web tech for the frontend.

Links:

Wails.io

Want to support me with the show, talk about it and rate it where you're listening. Also you can purchase my courses at 50% off for listeners of the show: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

047: Fyne toolkit with Andy Williams

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 06:13:11 -0500

This week I talk with Andy Williams about the Fyne toolkit. It's impressive how much you can do with Fyne targeting mostly all platform where you'd want your application to run. In a world where web is getting a little bit out of hand, it's refreshing to see that desktop still have its place in the software world.

Links:

Fyne website

Join us on #gopodcast in the Gophers Slack. Any mention of this podcast would be extremely appreciated. To support the effort of running the pod you can purchase my courses at 50% off for listeners: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

046: Let's talk about Rust with John Arundel

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 04:50:40 -0400

John is proposing learning Rust to enhance Gophers programming knowledge. I do enjoy learning new thing personally, Rust always has been or at least seems to required an extra effort to get started with. John is trying to make it more approachable.

Links:

If you enjoy the show the best way to support it is by sharing and talking about it to your circle and if you can by purchasing my courses (50% off for listeners of this show). Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

045: Gomponent with Markus Wustenberg

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 05:31:41 -0400

This week I'm joined by Markus Wustenberg, the author of Gomponent, a library that lets you write your HTML directly in Go using a component approach with type safety.

Links:

There's a channel in the Gophers slack community, join #gopodcast.

If you'd want to support the show consider purchasing my Go courses, which are 50% off for listeners of this show. Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

Toying with static analysis of HTML templates

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:58:33 -0400

After last episode with Templ maintainers I was really pumped to try Templ and see if it would work for me. Without spoiling too much I believe it would have been easier to start from scratch with Templ vs. trying to migrate an existing project.

This led me to try and see if I could add static analysis of my templates in my library tpl. I don't really have a PoC yet, but kind of getting close to it. If everything continue I should be able to capture errors in using of wrong field in template, like typos in field name that are caught at runtime at this moment.

Links: https://github.com/dstpierre/tpl

Also if you want to support this show, this is a 50% discount on my courses: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

Adrian Hesketh and Joe Davidson on Templ

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:04:48 -0400

In this episode Adrian Hesketh and Joe Davidson from Templ joins me and we talk about the what, why, and how of Templ. If you haven't checked it out, Templ helps creating strongly typed html template and use a component based approach to building web interface in Go.

Links:

As always if you want to support the time I invest into this podcast the best way is by purchasing my courses which are at 50% off for listener of this pod: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

042: Gate keeping and teaching of programming with Ramesh Sringeri

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:28:02 -0400

Ramesh joins me this week to talk about his experiences teaching programming in Girls who code club and gate keeping that can discourage some people from choosing computer science as their career path.

Links:

Confluence podcast with Ramesh
Scott Hanselman's blog Profanity doesn't work
Ramesh's blog
Hanselminutes podcast
ChangeLog

I'd appreciate any mention you can share about the pod. If you'd like to support the effort, the best way if to purchase my courses, listeners of the show get 50% off Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

041: Speaking at conferences with Matt Boyle

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 05:50:55 -0400

Getting out there, showing what you're currently doing / learning, starting a blog, creating content to help other software engineers, those are all good way to distinguish yourself. You might want to consider speaking at conferences as well. In this episode we're talking with Matt Boyle about the what, why, how of getting your first conference talk accepted.

Links:

As always I'd appreciate if you can talk about the pod, share a link, add a review. If you want to support the efforts the best way is to purchase my courses: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

040: CLI in Go and other tech talks with Marian Montagnino

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:28:32 -0400

I'm joined by Marian Montagnino this week. We talk about CLI in Go, programming languages. Java and Elm mentioned, be warned .;) and other tech related stuff. Marian wrote a book on building CLI in Go and presented multiple talks at Go conferences.

We had some connectivity glitches during our call making it challenging. You won't here the internet cuts as we did, but the lag is real, sorry about that.

Links:

As always I'd highly appreciate any mention of the pod and if you want to support the show the best way is to grab my courses at 50% off for listeners of the show: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go

039: Go is now more fun to build web apps

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 06:03:25 -0400

I started a monolith-style web application couple of weeks ago and force to admit that Go is more and more fun to use where I was considering more like Django or Rails before.

For me there was still the templates aspect that needed to be fixed, and I wrote a library for that. The other major place where I was not enjoying myself was the database code, found it way to repetitive for application that had a lot of SQL tables.

We're in a very good place at the moment and the benefits of having a compiled language to build heavy backend web application is great.

Links:

dstpierre/tpl - a simple library to help with templates structuring, parsing, and rendering
sqlc - I finally surrender, and I like it

As always if you want to support the show you may purchase my courses Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

038: Finally, found a good use case for Go's plugin

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 21 May 2024 06:25:23 -0400

I've restarted active development on my open source Go backend server API StaticBackend. For a long time I wanted to make its CLI size smaller, and I decided to use Go's plugin package to extract a functionality that used a dependency that was accounting for more than 50% of its 170 MB. Go plugin were the solution I decided to use for this and I explain the problem and the solution in this episode.

Links:

As always it's appreciated if you can talk about the pod and share. You may also purchase my course(s) if you want to contribute with money, there's a 50% off coupon with those links: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go.

As always

037: Is Go a good choice for your Startup?

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 09 May 2024 07:14:38 -0400

I've been building SaaS since 2008 and built two with Go. Big spoiler, the technology you choose has a little impact in the early stage of a software business. There's some danger to over-engineer and use complex construct while you still does not even know if what you're building is desirable. Heck, you don't even know what you're building at first.

I'm giving some example of common traps and pitfails technical founder tend to fail into when jumping into a startup venture for first times. And yes, times is plural, because it takes multiple attempt before learning lessons.

If you enjoy the pod please consider sharing / talking about it. You may also contribute by purchasing my courses Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go courses, they're at 50% off for listeners of the show.

036: Game UI in Go with EbitenUI maintainer Mark Carpenter

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 02 May 2024 09:16:58 -0400

I'm joined by Mark Carpenter, the maintainer of EbitenUI, a UI library you may use with your Ebitengine Go game. Game dev is slowly making its way to Go with game library like Ebitengine and Raylib. The nice thing about Ebitengine is that it's built in Go, have great cadance in its development and is simple to use.

EbitenUI is a UI library that allows you to build UI for your games. It's a simple library that integrates smoothly with the programming model of Ebitengine games.

Links:

As always if you want to support my efforts with this show please talk about it, share it. You may also purchase my online courses Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go, there's a 50% discount for listeners of this show.

035: Going deeper into Encore with its founder André Eriksson

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 05:52:14 -0400

A follow-up episode on last week episode. We go a little bit deeper into Encore with André Eriksson. Encore can do a lot for your Go project and infrastructure. It allows your team to focus on your product and provides local development and DevOps tooling that help your team go faster.

Links:

How to support the show:

Share and talk about it.
Purchase my courses: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go (50% off for listeners of the show).
Want to join as a guest, pitch me your idea via Twitter @dominicstpierre.

034: Encore, domain design in Go with Bill Kennedy

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 06:33:17 -0400

This week I'm joined by Bill Kennedy. Bill makes me discover Encore which can handles service-to-service communication while programmers focus on their application. We talk about domain design in Go and how to architect an isolated system following the 3-tier layer design.

Links:

As always if you enjoy the show consider sharing it / talking about it. If you'd want to support the effort the best way is by purchasing my courses, Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go. Those links have a 50% discount coupon applied to them for listeners of the show.

033: Deployment orchestrator in Go, part of my upcoming SaaS

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:38:00 -0400

My upcoming SaaS product at first wasn't suppose to be rolled out as a product, but was for my own usage. Turns out as I was using it and selling my online courses that it appears to me as being fairly usefull and could compete against existing course selling platform.

The hic is that it wasn't built as a SaaS in mind, so I have to deploy one application per customer. It's completely multi-tenant. To help with automating the deployment of a new tenant, I wrote and orchestrator with agents to facilitate the deployment of a new application. I thought this part could be interesting to hear about as it's written in Go.

Want to support the show? The best way is by purchasing my courses Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go. Listeners of this show get a 50% discount on all store product.

032: Go cryptography with John Arundel

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 06:27:37 -0400

In this episode I talk with John Arundel about cryptography in Go. John wrote a great book on the subject called Explore Go: Cryptography.

Security is a growing concerns and you should up your game as a Go programmer. We're lucky to have such a solid crypt package in the standard library. I'd encourage you to get familiar with it if you haven't yet.

Links:

As always, if you want to support this show the best way (other than talking about it) is by purchasing my courses: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go, here's a 50% direct discount for listeners of this podcast.

031: Using shim on API to prevent breaking changes

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 06:11:15 -0400

In 2021 Twilio sent a termination email on their Fax services. I was consulting as the CTO in a credit bureau that was in the start of an acquisition process with Equifax Canada. There was just no time to "waste" on changing provider and rewriting this part of the system to satisfy the new provider API.

Would have been grand if the provider would have offered a shim that replicated Twilio's API and map that to their own API. Imagine how many companies needed to rewrite this part at the same time. Offering this as the provider that receives X thousands new customers would have been a superb engineering experience.

So maybe we can apply this concept internally as well. When a team needs to introduce breaking changes, a good solution might be for them to provide a shim over the old API so no other teams need to do anything.

This is obviously a tad dangerous and might introduce some technical debt. But as everything, it depends.

030: gRPC in Go with Chris Shepherd

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 05:51:42 -0500

I receive Chris Shepherd and we talk about gRPC in Go. If you're building systems with lots of micro-services, gRPC is a good way to provide strong contracts between your services and improve communications.

Links:

The best way to support this show, other than talking about it, is by purchasing my online courses on Go: Build SaaS apps in Go and Build a Google Analytics in Go. Here's a direct link with a special discount for the pod listeners.

029: I've a confession to make, I've wrote 2 apps in Django

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 07:23:03 -0500

This episode was supposed to be focussing on templ, the tempalte library, but as I was going in details I found it hard not to explain the back story of why I started looking for something to help html/template be more "fun" to build rapid side projects, you know, CRUD heavy web application.

Links:

templ: https://templ.guide/
The lib I forgot the name during the episode: https://github.com/Masterminds/sprig

If you'd like to support this show the best way is to puchase my courses, I've one call Build SaaS apps in Go and another one called Build a Google Analytics in Go. Here's a direct discount for listener of this show.

028: To TDD or not... or when

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 07:03:29 -0500

Quick solo episode on TDD and when I experienced it was used best and when I personally not use it but use an approach of writing a bit of code, than tests, thant another bit of code, etc.

Buying my courses is the way to support this show, here's a direct discount for listeners.

027: Debugging in Go with Matt Boyle

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 06:03:13 -0500

I chatted with Matt Boyle about debugging Go code. Matt is creating a course about this topic and discussing debugging as a tool you may add to your toolbelt.

Links

As always, if you'd like to support this podcast the best way is to purchase my courses / talk about them. I have 2 courses on Go and here's a direct discount for podcast listeners.

026: We can do better with interviews and onboarding

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 06:51:40 -0500

I believe we can do better regarding software engineer interviews and this entire process (also including onboarding). I think companies that will be mediocre at those two aspects will have a hard time with younger programmers, which I fully support.

025: Iterators are coming to Go

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:58:22 -0500

Iterators are going to be useful to process large amount of data without having to load an entire slice or maps in memory but instead create iterators that can be used from a for item := range myIterators().

If you'd like to support this show and/or are interested in Go courses I have, here's a direct discount link specially for listeners of this show.

024: Do you understand this weird production behavior?

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 06:58:53 -0500

Something absurd happened in 2024 for one of my consulting client's production web application, and this code for a time. The time zero value is behaving differently than it has been since 2018.

Date has a value: No date, zero value
I launched my new course Build a Google Analytics in Go, if you're interested and/or want to support this show that's how to do it.

023: Reaction to reddit post on null pointer error in Go

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 10:13:41 -0500

I react to the post on the Go subreddit of last week talking about a null pointer error occuring in production for a Go program.

This is the YouTube video I made.

If you'd want to support this podcast, I have Go courses available for purchase here, I just launch my latest course Build a Google Analytics in Go with a 50% discount for listener of this show.

022: What to answer to "Why Go?"

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 07:17:08 -0500

Typical reasons to use Go might sounds exciting for us used to Go, but might not be as attractive for people that haven't experienced Go yet and might not realize they have some small heritants that Go fixes/improves.

I've pre-launched my new course call Build a Google Analytics in Go, as listener to this podcast you're getting a 50% off during pre-sale, the course is due to launch before the end of December.

If you want to support this show, purchasing the course is the best way, also talking about it ;).

021: Why I had to work 30h straight in 2002

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 06:59:33 -0500

Things were very different when I started as a junior developer. This is a story of an out of the ordinary day where worked from ~9h am to 11am (the next day), the two of us that were in charge of everything at a small financial company.

This one has nothing to do with Go, but I thought it was worth telling as a story.

I'm soon to launch (pre-launch) my next course Build a Google Analytics in Go. If you're interested make sure to sign-up for the newsletter on my store. https://store.dominicstpierre.com/

020: Discipline is required to build long-live software

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 06:49:20 -0500

As we're building more and more of distributed systems I believe that one trait / culture successful team will require is discipline. Personal opinion, we tend to complicate our lives in the last decade compare to what things were before. But without an extra attention to some details, it will be a nightmare to maintain systems in the long run.

As always, if you'd like to support the show the best way is to purchase my course. Sharing it also very much appreciated.

019: Dependencies maintenance in Go

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 09:26:10 -0400

I talk about dependencies management in Go. How to keep your dependencies up-to-date and how to check if there's any updates available. What to do when a package change their major version.

List all packages and latest versions:
$ go list -m -u all

Update all packages to their latest minor versions:
$ go get -u ./...

If you'd like to support this podcast consider buying a copy of my course Build SaaS apps in Go.

018: WebAssembly runner, a real-world use case

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 10:11:45 -0400

I was toying with the idea of using WebAssembly runner as a plugin / extension mechanism from a Go (host) program to extend the capabilities of a program at runtime.

* min/max bult-ins coming in 1.21: https://tip.golang.org/ref/spec#Min_and_max
* wazero: https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero
* wasmr: https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-go
* StaticBackend: https://github.com/staticbackendhq/core

Help your OSS with GitHub CLI, Codespaces and linters

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 29 May 2023 06:26:47 -0400

I'm trying to make my open source backend API project StaticBackend as easy as possible to contribute.

Couple of things I've added lately was worth mentionning. GitHub Codespaces is helpful and nicely done. It goes 1-step further than Docker and make contributing to an open source project a simple task, especially for small and quick 1-time contribution.

This couple with GitHub CLI, which I admit, have just starting using it. And linters to make sure the quality of the code is as high as it can be.

StaticBackend website | GitHub repo

If you'd want to support this podcast, the best way is to talk about it, sponsor my open source project or purchase my course Build SaS apps in Go.

016: What I'd hope WASM brought to web dev

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 08 May 2023 10:10:48 -0400

I talk about what I'd love to see coming to web development. While WebAssembly can be used as an alternative to JavaScript, I believe we're not looking into the real problems related to building web application.

015: How do you put things in production?

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 06:48:42 -0400

It has been a rough last 4 months for me and I finally get a chance to restart publishing episodes.

In this episode I talk a bit about what I've seen so far as process / flow for deploing software in production. Going from the old days when I started as a junior software dev where we were pushing straight into prod to what I discovered at a big organization where putting something in production spread accross multiple days and involves a lot of people.

I'd like to hear how things are working for you, what is your process from bug fix/new feature to production. I'm genuinely curious after the experience I had seeing how thins can be tedious for this process.

014: We should contribute more to open source

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 07:35:15 -0500

This is the last episode of 2022. Those are my thoughts about how I think we should try to help more as user of open source project and librairies.

This episode content was inspired by the Gorilla Web Tool Kit archiving their Go projects.

On that note, I'll be back with more Go content on January, and will try to keep my 1 episode per two weeks plan for 2023.

Thank you!

013: Go's concurrency to the rescue

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 06:22:31 -0500

Go's worker queue pattern:

type WorderPool struct {
queue chan int
}

func (wp *WorkerPool) start() {
for i := 0; i < 500; i++ {
go funcIO {
for id := range wp.queue {
doSomething(id)
}
}()
}
}

func (wp *WorkerPool) add(id int) {
wp.queue <- id
}

Go 1.20 errors.Join / multiple unwrap error
My course: Build SaaS apps in Go

Best way to show support for the pod is by sharing it around and buying my course.

012: Concurrency isn't Go main selling point

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 06:39:26 -0500

Let's talk about Go's concurrency. It's a powerful tool to have at your disposal but a hard one to master and use correctly.

If you want to support the pod the best way is to purchase my course (thanks).

011: Options where to deploy your Go servers

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 10:34:53 -0400

At beginning I was deploying my Go servers to a DigitalOcean droplet. But for the last 3 years I'm enjoying Render, which listen to my git push and automatically deploy app for me in a blue-green deployment.

If you enjoy my podcast have a look at the following:

- Build SaaS apps in Go, my course on building web application in Go
- StaticBackend, an open-source Go backend server API
- @dominicstpierre on Twitter

010: internal package gotchas

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 06:53:33 -0400

I recently created an exportable Go package from StaticBackend, an open source backend API which was self-hosted.

I ended up using the internal package way to heavily and this design decision bite me when I decided to create an exportable package. Now all things that needed to be expose that was in the internal package had to be refactored into their own packages.

Links:

009: Set variables at build time with -LDFLAGS

Dominic St-Pierre — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 07:15:05 -0400

Usage of -ldflags:

go build -ldflags "-X main.varName=from_build" -o mycli

Inside your code:

var varName string

func main() {
fmt.Println(varName) // prints "from_build"
}

Here's what I'm using for StaticBackend -v flag:

go build -ldflags \
"-X github.com/staticbackendhq/core/config.BuildTime=$(shell date +'%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S') \
-X github.com/staticbackendhq/core/config.CommitHash=$(shell git log --pretty=format:'%h' -n 1) \
-X github.com/staticbackendhq/core/config.Version=$(shell git describe --tags)" \
-o staticbackend

Links:

StaticBackend website
StaticBackend GitHub repo
Build SaaS apps in Go (my online course and book)

008: The day my Go service got csharpify

Dominic St-Pierre — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 15:03:56 -0400

If you'd like to join the dev of StaticBackend a Firebase alternative I'm building in Go you're welcome, there's a discord if you'd want to chat. https://github.com/staticbackendhq/core

If you'd like to checkout my course called Build SaaS apps in Go or want to support this show, that's the best way.

If you're on Twitter make sure to follow me: https://twitter.com/dominicstpierre

007: Is Go's database/sql verbosity that bad?

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 07:41:52 -0400

sqlx: https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx
sqlboiler: https://github.com/volatiletech/sqlboiler

If you're looking to learn how to build web API with Go, checkout my course on building SaaS in Go.

006: Build softwares that stand the test of time

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 11:41:14 -0400

I've been maintaining 20 years old systems for a long time now. I've been working with legacy applications in .NET. To me Go has some great advantages built-in by design that should help in 10-15 years from now when the applications that are created today will be on maintenance mode.

005: Spring arriving, so is Go 1.18 and Generics

Dominic St-Pierre — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 06:06:46 -0500

What are you thinking about Generics? What about 3rd party libraries that will pop from everywhere once Go 1.18 launched?

Personally, I'll appreciate what the std lib offers and will wait before writing generics code, making sure I really need it.

I'm currently working on a free and open-source self-hosted Firebase alternative - if such things sound interesting, please join the Discord group and contribution are very welcome (it's written in Go of course).

This is my course on Building SaaS apps in Go.

004: Using interfaces for major refactor

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 10:31:54 -0500

If you'd like to check the code, the PR is still active.

StaticBackend repo: https://github.com/staticbackendhq/core

My course on Building SaaS in go

Share episode topic idea with me on Twitter @dominicstpierre

003: Pointers or !Pointers, stack, and heap

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 07:01:13 -0500

We go over what are pointers and when to use or not use them. For instance, this is probably not a good use for pointers.

func main() {
var i int = 10
abc(&i)
}

func abc(i *int) {
*i = 15
}

In my opinion any dereferencing is probably bad. Better way:

func main() {
var i int = 10
i = abc(i)
}

func abc(i int) int {
return 15
}

I also try to give some basics info regarding the stack and heap and why pointers might not be seen as an optimization.

I have a course on building SaaS in Go.

Follow me on Twitter.

002: Project structure & package name

Dominic St-Pierre — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 07:30:17 -0500

Don't stress too much about having the "proper" project structure to the point where you might over-engineer or be paralyzed by the thought of doing something wrong.

It's just hard, and even 5+ years of Go experience will not ensure you're creating the optimal packages and structure. It's an art mixed with preferences that become a little easier with time but remain challenging.

I wrote a getting started with Go guide that cover a little about project structure and how to get started with Go.

If you're in writing web applications and maybe even SaaS, I have a course on creating API-first SaaS with Go.

001: Error handling in Go

Dominic St-Pierre — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:53:41 -0500

Wrapping error: fmt.Errorf("error trying to do X: %w", err)
Package errors: https://pkg.go.dev/errors

Example of not using the happy path at 1st indentation:

try {
if (user.HasAccessTo(Admin) {
if (somethingElse()) {
// happy path
}
else {}
}
else {}
}
catch(Exception ex) {
// what really happened, and where?
}

An example of happy path in idiomatic Go:

ok, error := hasAccessTo(user, ADMIN)
if err != nil || !ok {
// handle not access
}

if !somethingElse() {
// handle something else false
}
// Happy path

My course on building SaaS apps in Go.