Linter is a static code analysis tool used to find programming errors, bugs, leaks of code standards, and even security flaws. These tools help developers because they save time by identifying issues before they happen in the production environment. It also keeps developers from unnecessarily checking if your colleague used the team standards.

Each programming language has their own tools: Ruby has Rubocop, JS has Eslint, and Go can’t be different. Searching at Awesome Go, a curated list of Go software, many tools can lint your code, but my favorite is golangci-lint. It is an aggregator of linting tools, meaning you only need one tool for multiple linters in your project.

Computer and programming languages were born to make our lives easier, as they automatize day-to-day tasks. Programmers and software engineers usually have to build files that are almost the same as others, where the only change is one field or another. For example, there are configuration files, invoices, XMLs, HTMLs or any file which we can use to build other files. There is a simple solution for this problem: we can create a template and change the parts that I need manually! That works, but it is not the best way to deal with the problem because it is scalable. We can use technology to help.

The Kong, quoting its own documentation, is an open-source API gateway, cloud-native, platform-agnostic, scalable API Gateway distinguished for its high performance and extensibility via plugins. Kong has a lot of official plugins that allow us to customize what we need, and when there aren’t any available, you can build your own.

The default language for building plugins its Lua, but other languages are supported, including Go. I don’t have much experience writing code with Lua, so using Go allows me a higher development speed and quality on my plugins.

One of the best Go features is how easy we can use concurrency. The language gives us goroutines, which are like lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime. It help us to run several functions at the same instant and is very helpful if you wish to improve the performance of your application.

Keyword go

Using this feature is easy as adding the go keyword before any function call. This will make the function run concurrently. To make it simpler, let’s show you the code. Here I’ve written the SleepSort algorithm, which uses the sleep method to sort each element in its place.

Currently, a large part of authentication flows is based on generating a token, which can, for example, use the JWT standard. The frontend then makes requests informing the backend who the user is that is actually making the call. You can see this when the frontend sends the Authorization header in its requests.

Extracting information

It’s common for this token to contain user information, like their ID, for example. So when it receives the request, the backend decodes the token to extract this information and then link it to a user in the database. With the user in hand, we execute the desired action. Below, I’ll give you an example of a Go service that does exactly this.