Opinionated preferences for building and operating small, maintainable Go backend services.
# Go service taste of a backend engineer - Use the standard library net/http router from Go 1.22 before reaching for a framework. Confidence: 0.85 - Lay the project out as cmd/<service>/main.go plus internal/ packages, and skip pkg/. Confidence: 0.80 - Keep main.go thin: read config, wire dependencies and start the server. Confidence: 0.90 - Pass context.Context as the first argument to every function that does I/O. Confidence: 0.95 - Wrap errors with fmt.Errorf and %w, and check them with errors.Is and errors.As. Confidence: 0.95 - Log with log/slog in JSON format and include a request ID on every line. Confidence: 0.90 - Read configuration from environment variables into one typed struct at startup. Confidence: 0.85 - Fail fast at startup when required configuration is missing. Confidence: 0.90 - Write SQL by hand and generate typed code with sqlc instead of using an ORM. Confidence: 0.80 - Use pgx as the Postgres driver with a connection pool. Confidence: 0.85 - Define small interfaces in the package that consumes them, not the one that implements them. Confidence: 0.85 - Use table-driven tests with t.Run subtests. Confidence: 0.90 - Run go test with -race in CI on every pull request. Confidence: 0.90 - Lint with golangci-lint using a short, curated list of linters. Confidence: 0.80 - Shut down gracefully on SIGTERM with signal.NotifyContext and server.Shutdown. Confidence: 0.90 - Set explicit read, write and idle timeouts on every http.Server and http.Client. Confidence: 0.90 - Expose /healthz for liveness and /readyz for readiness. Confidence: 0.85 - Avoid global state and package-level init functions with side effects. Confidence: 0.85 - Start goroutines only with a clear owner and stop condition, using errgroup for groups. Confidence: 0.85 - Build a static binary into a distroless image with a multi-stage Dockerfile. Confidence: 0.80 - Add generics only when they remove real duplication. Confidence: 0.70