Production & Systems¶
What separates senior Go engineers from the rest. This section covers everything needed to design, build, deploy, and operate Go services in production -- from architectural patterns to performance optimization to low-level language features.
| # | Topic | What You'll Learn | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Design Patterns in Go | Factory, strategy, observer, decorator, middleware, DI | Advanced |
| 2 | gRPC & Protocol Buffers | Service definitions, streaming, interceptors, gRPC-Gateway | Advanced |
| 3 | Database Patterns | database/sql, connection pooling, transactions, migrations |
Advanced |
| 4 | Distributed Systems | Circuit breaker, retry with backoff, rate limiting, bulkhead | Advanced |
| 5 | Production Go | Structured logging, graceful shutdown, health checks, config | Advanced |
| 6 | Profiling & Performance | pprof, benchmarks, escape analysis, allocation reduction |
Advanced |
| 7 | Build Tags | //go:build, conditional compilation, platform-specific code |
Advanced |
| 8 | Code Generation | go generate, stringer, custom generators, AST manipulation |
Advanced |
| 9 | CGo | Calling C from Go, memory management, performance cost | Advanced |
| 10 | Reflection | reflect package, type introspection, struct tag parsing |
Advanced |
| 11 | Unsafe Package | unsafe.Pointer, memory alignment, zero-copy conversions |
Advanced |
| 12 | Plugin System | plugin package, limitations, production alternatives |
Advanced |
Interview Quick Hits
- Go design patterns look different from Java/C# -- composition over inheritance, no abstract classes
- gRPC with protobuf is the standard for inter-service communication in Go microservices
database/sql.DBis a connection pool, not a single connection -- configure pool settings- Circuit breakers, retries with jitter, and rate limiting are table-stakes for distributed Go services
- Know how to use
pprofto find CPU and memory bottlenecks -- this is what senior interviews test - CGo has significant overhead per call (~100-200ns) -- "CGo is not Go"