Practical Go & Backend Engineering
Learn Go by building production systems. Practical guides on Go, APIs, PostgreSQL, microservices, cloud, testing and performance.
funcFeatured()[]Article
View all →Understanding HTTP Servers in Go: From TCP Listen to Your First Handler
What actually happens when you call http.ListenAndServe: TCP listen and accept, the goroutine-per-connection model, the Handler interface, routing, and the timeouts a real server needs — with diagrams and a runnable example.
Designing a Production-Ready Go Backend: Architecture, Reliability and Operations
How the pieces of a production Go backend fit together: application architecture, reliability patterns, data, messaging, security, observability, and deployment — plus when to choose a monolith, modular monolith, or microservices.
Kubernetes for Go Developers: Deploying a Production-Ready Go API
What actually happens when Kubernetes sends your Go process SIGTERM, and the Deployment, Service, probe, and resource config a production Go API needs.
funcLatest()[]Article
Defer, Panic, and Recover in Go
How defer actually schedules a call, what panic does to the call stack, why recover only works inside a deferred function, and the real-world pattern of recovering from panics in HTTP middleware — with diagrams.
Error Handling in Go: Custom Errors, Wrapping, and errors.Is/As
Why Go treats errors as ordinary values instead of exceptions, how to build custom error types, how wrapping with %w preserves the original cause, and how errors.Is and errors.As actually work — with diagrams.
Go Modules and Packages: Setting Up and Structuring a Go Project
What a Go module actually is, how go.mod and go.sum work, how packages and import paths map to directories, and how to structure a project before you write your first real program.
Pointers in Go: When to Use *T and Why
What a pointer actually is, why Go passes everything by value by default, and the concrete rule for when a function or method should take a pointer instead of a copy — with diagrams.
Slices, Arrays, and Maps in Go: How They Actually Work
Why a slice is a small header pointing at a backing array, what append actually does when it grows, why slicing can alias memory you didn't mean to share, and how Go's maps behave — with diagrams.
Structs, Methods, and Composition in Go
How to define your own types with structs, attach behavior with methods, and build up functionality through embedding instead of inheritance — with diagrams and real examples.
funcTopics()[]Category
Go
14 articlesLanguage fundamentals, concurrency, and idiomatic patterns for production Go code.
Backend
5 articlesAPI design, service architecture, and building maintainable backend systems.
PostgreSQL
5 articlesIndexing, query planning, and practical database engineering for backend developers.
Microservices
7 articlesService boundaries, communication patterns, and project structure for distributed systems.
Cloud
1 articleDeploying and operating backend systems on modern cloud infrastructure.
Performance
2 articlesProfiling, benchmarking, and optimizing Go applications under real workloads.
Testing
1 articleUnit, integration, and HTTP testing strategies for reliable backend software.
Distributed Systems
2 articlesLocks, consensus, delivery guarantees, and the failure modes unique to systems that span machines.
Security
1 articleAuthentication, authorization, and the attack surfaces every production API has to defend.
Architecture
1 articleSystem design trade-offs for backend services, from a single API to a full production platform.
New here? Follow the Go roadmap for a structured path through all of it.
GoBackend Starter
A production-oriented Go backend template: Chi, PostgreSQL, SQLC, JWT authentication, structured logging, Docker, and tests — the same architecture used throughout the articles on this site.
$ git clone github.com/gobackend-dev/gobackend-starter
$ cd gobackend-starter
$ cp .env.example .env
$ docker compose up
# API running at localhost:8080
funcWhyGoBackend()[]Reason
Production-first
Every guide is built around real systems, not toy examples.
Backend-focused
Go, PostgreSQL, microservices, and the operational details in between.
No fluff
Problem, reasoning, implementation, and trade-offs — nothing padded.
Tested code
Examples reflect the standard library and code that actually compiles.
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