Requirements

Before you start this course, make sure you’ve read and followed all of the instructions in the prep document. This will get you set up and explain how to work through the projects.

Remember: you can always Google or ask for help if you get stuck.

Projects

This course is structured into self-contained projects that you can work through at your own pace.

Each project has its own directory with a README.md file that has instructions. If you want to take a look at one way of completing an exercise, there’s some code waiting on a branch prefixed impl/ (short for “implementation”) and an associated Pull Request for you to look at. Try not to copy!

Most exercises finish with a list of optional extension tasks. It’s highly recommended that you try them out. Note that often the extensions are open-ended and under-specified - make sure to think about them with a curious mind: Why are they useful? What trade-offs do they have?

1. Output and Error Handling
   An introduction to how to handle errors in Go, and how to present information to users of programs run on the command line.
2. CLI & Files
   An introduction to building things with Go by replicating the unix tools cat and ls.
3. Interfaces
   An introduction to interfaces in Go.
4. File Parsing
   Practice parsing different formats of files, both standard and custom.
5. Concurrency
   Put synchronisation primitives into action by building a thread-safe cache.
6. Servers & HTTP requests
   Learn about long-running processes, HTTP and curl
7. Servers & Databases
   Build a server that takes data from a database and serves it in json format
8. Multiple Servers
   Build and run file & API servers behind nginx in a simple multi-server architecture
9. Docker & Cloud Deployment
   Use containers to reproducibly deploy applications into the cloud
10. gRPC
    Learn about RPCs and how they differ from REST, and start thinking about observability
11. Batch Processing
    Build an image processing pipeline with cloud storage
12. Buggy App
    Run, debug, and fix a buggy application
13. Memcache
    Explore sharding and replication of state
14. Kafka Cron
    Build a distributed multi-server application handling variable load, with Kafka as a task queue
15. RAFT and OTel
    Build a complex distributed system for with strong consistency, and instrument it with tracing