A brief info about me…..

Hello world! My name is Lucas, I’m a 31-year-old Brazilian who lives in the Czech Republic (or Czechia ? 🤔) and I work as a software engineer. I worked in a different field for 7/8 years and I got stuck in this area. I was unmotivated, just doing the basics and keeping the money coming in. But I was missing something to inspire me and have this “fire” from working with something.

Talking with my wife (I’m soooo thankful to her because of this), she gave me an idea: “Why don’t you find a subject you like and get a crash course on Udemy to see how it goes?”. After this talk, I thought and thought and thought and thought until I remembered that I tried Python once, but I wasn’t that inspired at that time. Why not try again? Maybe a different language?

I then talked to a colleague from work, a dev, about what he would recommend and he suggested me a JS course. I thought: why not? It was the most well-spent 15 dollars in my life… From that time on, I ‘ve never stopped studying.

I dived into JS and I started with NodeJS, Express, and React. I switched from my old profession once I felt (at least a little bit) prepared to face a SE position. I studied JS and its ecosystem more and more, a little bit of networking, data structure, and algorithms. And then a new guy in town caught my eyes, yes, a gopher! And here I am, writing about him.

Nowadays, I’m working with Go on the backend and I’ll try to teach what I know because knowledge needs to be shared and I’m very thankful to all the community which helped to develop myself.

Talk is cheap, show me the project

After this brief intro, I’ll bring more details about the project itself and how it will be structured.

This is the first heads-up about this project: If you don’t know anything about Go, I highly recommend you learn first.

We will use a lot of concepts (interfaces, structs, types, and so on) from the language, which you should learn before. Go has really good resources on the internet, like go-by-example, tour of Go, and effective Go - all of them for free. But if you would like to code and learn the concepts at the same time, that’s okay, too. You are very welcome here.

We will start a small project to create, read, update, and delete dogs (patients) from the database, like a small system for a veterinary clinic.

I’ll structure the project using the common structure model-dao-service-controller layout and show you some practices that I like to use in my projects. I'll try to dive into some concepts, like when you use or not mocks, why I do things the way I do them, and share all the knowledge I’ve got over the last few years.
About the stack and technologies, we will use Echo as a framework to build our middleware, controllers, and the app and Postgres as a database.

And of course, we will test everything possible. From bottom to top, the dao layers, service, controllers, and finish with a good integration test. Tests are an important step and they guarantee that our API works as expected. And this is something that I miss from some tutorials, so this is why I’m including it here.

Next steps:

So, soon we will do our first “hello, world” with Echo and Go and prepare the docker containers and the docker-compose file, so stay tuned for the next posts of this series of posts.

A nerd moment: But why Prometheus of Go?

I’m a kind of a History nerd, I like to learn more about what has already happened and that way try not to repeat some mistakes from the past. But I also enjoy some ludic stuff, and recently I discovered Greek mythology.

The Prometheus myth tells the story of a Titan who imagined the world and would like to build one. Zeus taught him all the knowledge he had. Prometheus went back after learning from Zeus and did to his knowledge something that changed not only his but also all of our lives: he shared it with humans: he taught them how to plant and manage fire and such event changed the destiny of humanity. Unfortunately, Prometheus had a really bad time in the end, and I advise you to read this myth which is one of my favorites.