I’ve been playing around with the new SerDes (serialisers/deserialisers) that shipped with Confluent Platform 5.5 - Protobuf, and JSON Schema (these were added to the existing support for Avro). The serialisers (and associated Kafka Connect converters) take a payload and serialise it into bytes for sending to Kafka, and I was interested in what those bytes look like. For that I used my favourite Kafka swiss-army knife: kafkacat.

A Tour of Go : Goroutines was OK but as with some previous material I headed over to Go by example for clearer explanations.

👉 A Tour of Go : Exercise: Images

This is based on the Picture generator from the Slices exercise.

👉 A Tour of Go : Readers

I’m not intending to pick holes in the Tour…but it’s not helping itself ;-)

For an introductory text, it makes a ton of assumptions about the user. Here it introduces Readers, and the explanation is good—but the example code looks like this:

👉 A Tour of Go : Exercise: Errors

Like Interfaces, the Tour didn’t really do it for me on Errors either. Too absract, and not enough explanation of the code examples for my liking. It also doesn’t cover the errors package which other tutorial do. I’m not clear if that’s because the errors package isn’t used much, or the Tour focusses only on teaching the raw basics.

👉 A Tour of Go : Interfaces

This page really threw me, for several reasons:

👉 A Tour of Go : Function Closures

So far the Tour has been 🤔 and 🧐 and even 🤨 but function closures had me 🤯 …

Each of the words on the page made sense but strung together in a sentence didn’t really make any sense to me.

👉 A Tour of Go : Exercise - Maps

This is probably bread-and-butter for any seasoned programmer, but I enjoyed the simple process and satisfaction of breaking the problem down into steps to solve using what the tutorial had just covered. Sketching out the logic in pseudo-code first, I figured that I wanted to do this:

👉 A Tour of Go : Slices

Slices made sense, until I got to Slice length and capacity. Two bits puzzled me in this code:

👉 A Tour of Go : Pointers

I’ve never used pointers before. Found plenty of good resources about what they are, e.g.

But why? It’s like explaining patiently to someone that 2+2 = 4, without really explaining why would we want to add two numbers together in the first place.