46. Go at Heroku

Johnny Boursiquot is an SRE at Heroku, and joining him on this episode are Ed Muller (one-time Go language owner at Heroku), and Rishabh Wason, an engineer fresh out of university. Ed initiates the conversation by talking about how Heroku rolls out buildpack updates to users that are concurrent with Go releases.

Heroku is a polyglot organization, and Go is being used as one of its four primary languages. It's finding its way into backends, microservices, and services which communicate with each other. Since many engineers at Heroku have experience in multiple languages, it's become essential for Go experts to teach others how to write idiomatic Go code. Part of this is done through the Go Design Guide, a living document that details the pros and cons of various ways to write Go logic. Ed in particular finds that pairing with other engineers on their issues has helped him understand a beginner's mindset, which he can then use to update internal documentation.

Rishab also shares his strategies for how he learned Go, coming at it with prior experience in Java and Python. He provides a list of online resources which helped him. He also talks about some of the discrepancies he found in different code bases--for example, in their different dependency management styles. For him, the way in which he grew his understanding of the language was to ask targeted questions to reviewers in his pull request.

Links from this episode

• Heroku's Go buildpack
• Futureforce places university graduates into internships and new jobs
• dep is a Go dependency management tool
• Go by Example is a popular place to see real-life Go examples
• Dave Cheney's blog covers a variety of Go topics