After the incredible experience I had with folks from Mattermost during Hacktoberfest (don't forget their thoughtful gift as well!), I decided to go with them once again for November.
Literally "going" with them this time, since their server is written in Go (I apologize for my hurtful sense of humor). During Hacktoberfest, I worked on their mobile app, which is written in TypeScript using React Native. However, the issue I got this time was related to their server, and this would be my first time working on a Go project.
Go
With absolutely no prior knowledge of Go, I made the right decision to learn it first. Fortunately, Go was super easy to get your hands on. I was genuinely amazed by the simplicity of it while being able to produce fast and reliable software. A one-hour video was all I needed to understand the basics, and I found myself pausing way less than when I learned Rust 😆.
First of all I want to spend some time to appreciate this adorably goofy gopher:
With that out of the way, I love that Go is statically and strongly typed. This is something I recently discussed with a friend: Statically and/or strongly typed languages only require a little more thoughts into your code design, but they can eliminate a huge amount of ambiguity. Plus, similar to Rust, the Go compiler can infer types where possible, which makes the extra thoughts even more trivial.
Some people call Go "the modern C". Now I get why: It performs really well and has the simplicity of C. It supports low-level operations using pointers. But unlike C, it comes with the features you'd expect from a modern language, such as interfaces, slices, maps, etc. Another fascinating feature is goroutine, which is a uniquely simple model to handle parallel executions.
The Mattermost Issue
Turned out I really went out and overboard with learning Go since this was a really simple issue. All I had to do was implementing error handling in a single file.
In the issue they have a section conveniently mentioned that they prefer errors to be either returned or logged. Knowing Mattermost's developer docs well, I quickly found the section about error handling.
The only obstacle I ran into was determining which log level to use. Although it was mentioned in the docs, I still found the definition ambiguous. However, after a quick search within the project, I realized that these functions always use the same log level in other places. This eliminated my doubts.
Since the functions I was working on serves static HTML pages, I also made sure a proper HTTP error code is returned when error occurs like so:
http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)
That's all the work! I filed the PR and was initially a little worried, since this was my first time working with Go, but it turned out to be fine. The PR was merged just after a minor fix.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a fun and easy issue to work on. I'm glad that I picked it even if it wasn't as challenging as some other issues I've been working on. I'm always happy to learn a new language and this was an perfect excuse for that! And it was kinda awesome to be able to use it right away.
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