A while back (2020), I published an article on How to Structure a Go Command-Line Project. Within that article, I stated that while there are many recommendations on structuring Go Projects, there is no set standard. The lack of a standard causes many new Gophers to question the best way…

I’m a big fan of testing; it is a critical part of software engineering and how reliable software gets built. I am also a big fan of making tests easier to manage and maintain. The easier a set of tests are to maintain, the more they are maintained, making them…

The net package in the Go standard library abstracts away many low-level networking details, making it easy for Go developers to create complex applications. However, the standard library can confuse developers who want to explore more advanced networking features like setting socket options on listeners. Today’s article is going to…

Graceful shutdown is vital to building highly resilient systems in a cloud-native environment. When we build cloud-native applications that follow the “cattle and not pets” philosophy, creating and destroying instances of applications is standard operating procedure. This article will discuss why it’s important to implement graceful shutdown mechanisms and how…

A standard performance tuning recommendation for distributed systems running on Linux is to adjust the tcp_rmem and tcp_wmem Kernel tunables. But what are these? Why are they important? How do they work? In today's article, we are going to explore the tcp_rmem (Receive Buffer) and tcp_wmem (Send Buffer) work and…

Concurrency is such a foundational capability of the Go language that it is effortless to write code that leverages multiple goroutines, sometimes without even knowing. As an example, if you’ve ever used the net/http package to create a web service, you’ve used goroutines. To handle incoming HTTP traffic, the HTTP…

Let’s face it, even with all the changes in how we run systems at scale, shell scripts are still a go-to tool in the DevOps & Site Reliability Engineers toolbelt. …

While most systems these days integrate over gRPC or HTTP, quite a few applications still speak custom protocols. And many of these custom protocols don't have handy packages like net/http to manage all of the TCP connection creation and management. Today's article is for anyone working directly with TCP connections…

Note: This article is a republish of a 2012 blog post, Medium doesn’t support back dating… Forgive the dated material. Linux has many tools available for troubleshooting; some are easy to use, some are more advanced. …