Chapter 1
Welcome on board!
Why business software
If you think “business software” is just enterprise payroll applications, think again. If you work on any web
application or SaaS product, you write business software.
You’ve seen poor code before, and we did as well. What’s worse, we’ve experienced how poorly designed codebases
hold the product’s rapid growth and the company’s success.
We looked into dierent patterns and techniques on how to improve this. We applied them in practice within our
teams and seen some work very well.
Why Go
Go’s initial success happened mostly within low-level applications, like CLI tools and infrastructure software, like
Kubernetes. However, Go 2020 Survey
1
shows that majority of Go developers write API/RPC services. 68% percent
of respondents use Go for “web programming”.
Some claim that Go is missing advanced features to become a productive tool. On the other hand, we feel simplicity
is Go’s strength. It’s viable for writing business applications not despite the lack of features but because of it.
You don’t want your business’s most crucial code to be smart and using the latest hacks. You need it to be
maintainable, extremely clear, and easy to change. We’ve found that using Go along advanced architectural
patterns can give you that.
It’s naive to think you will avoid technical debt just thanks to using Go. Any software project that’s complex
enough can become a Big Ball of Mud
2
if you don’t think about its design beforehand. Spoiler alert: microservices
don’t reduce complexity.
1
https://blog.golang.org/survey2020-results
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud
3
