Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

By : Achilleas Anagnostopoulos
Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

By: Achilleas Anagnostopoulos

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, Go has become one of the favorite languages for building scalable and distributed systems. Its opinionated design and built-in concurrency features make it easy for engineers to author code that efficiently utilizes all available CPU cores. This Golang book distills industry best practices for writing lean Go code that is easy to test and maintain, and helps you to explore its practical implementation by creating a multi-tier application called Links ‘R’ Us from scratch. You’ll be guided through all the steps involved in designing, implementing, testing, deploying, and scaling an application. Starting with a monolithic architecture, you’ll iteratively transform the project into a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that supports the efficient out-of-core processing of large link graphs. You’ll learn about various cutting-edge and advanced software engineering techniques such as building extensible data processing pipelines, designing APIs using gRPC, and running distributed graph processing algorithms at scale. Finally, you’ll learn how to compile and package your Go services using Docker and automate their deployment to a Kubernetes cluster. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to think like a professional software developer or engineer and write lean and efficient Go code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Software Engineering and the Software Development Life Cycle
3
Section 2: Best Practices for Maintainable and Testable Go Code
7
Section 3: Designing and Building a Multi-Tier System from Scratch
14
Section 4: Scaling Out to Handle a Growing Number of Users
18
Epilogue

What is software engineering?

Before we dive deeper into this chapter, we need to establish an understanding of some of the basic terms and concepts around software engineering. For starters, how do we define software engineering and in what ways does it differ from software development and programming in general? To begin answering this question, we will start by examining the formal definition of software engineering, as published in IEEE's Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology [7]:

"Software engineering is defined as the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software."

The main takeaway from this definition is that authoring code is just one of the many facets of software engineering. At the end of the day, any capable programmer can take a well-defined specification and...