Understanding Structs and JSON in Go: A Practical Guide with Examples
A practical guide to Go structs, pointers, struct tags, JSON encoding and decoding, and common serialization mistakes.
NOTES FROM THE BUILD
Blogs
Technical articles & learnings.
A place for what I learn while building with Go, working with databases, and connecting backend systems to real products.
Articles & notes
18 articlesUnderstanding Closures in Go: Scope, Lifetime, State, and the Loop Variable Gotcha
Understand Go closures through scope, lifetime, captured state, and the loop variable behavior that can cause subtle bugs.
Understanding Functions in Go: Parameters, Slices, Maps, Recursion, and defer
Explore how Go functions handle parameters, slices, maps, recursion, and defer, with examples of copying and shared state.
Understanding Maps in Go: Key-Value Pairs, Nil Maps, and the Comma-OK Idiom
Learn Go maps, key-value pairs, nil maps, initialization, iteration, and the comma-OK idiom through practical examples.
Understanding Arrays and Slices in Go: Memory, Copying, and Capacity
Understand Go arrays and slices through their memory layout, copying behavior, length, capacity, and shared backing arrays.
Understanding Strings in Go: Bytes, Runes, UTF-8, and Immutability
Explore strings in Go: bytes, runes, UTF-8, immutability, and the practical details of working with Unicode text.
Access Tokens Expire. So How Do Users Stay Logged In?
Understand how access tokens, refresh tokens, rotation, and server-side session state work together to keep users logged in.
JEV: The AI Model That Doesn’t Want to Be Your LLM
Explore JEV and the idea of giving AI agents a world model alongside language models for reasoning about actions and state.
Docker Networking Explained: Why Do We Need a Custom Network?
A practical explanation of Docker networking, container isolation, service discovery, and why custom networks are useful.
Kubernetes Isn’t Hard. You’re Probably Learning It Backwards.
Build a mental model of Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, worker nodes, IAM, networking, and scaling before memorizing commands.
Understanding Dockerfiles: FROM, RUN, COPY, ENV and CMD
Understand Dockerfile instructions FROM, RUN, COPY, ENV, and CMD, and how image construction differs from container startup.
Understanding GitHub Actions Workflow YAML: A Beginner’s Guide
Learn to read GitHub Actions workflow YAML: events, jobs, runners, steps, actions, and the structure behind CI/CD pipelines.
What I Learned About YAML: The Basics Every DevOps Beginner Should Know
Learn the YAML basics used in DevOps, including key-value pairs, indentation, lists, nested structures, and common mistakes.
What I Learned About Managing Production Secrets with AWS
Lessons from managing production configuration and secrets with AWS, separating application settings from sensitive values.
I Replaced AWS Access Keys in GitHub Actions With OIDC
A walkthrough of replacing long-lived AWS access keys in GitHub Actions with OIDC and temporary deployment credentials.
Your Docker Container Is Running. So Why Can’t Your App Connect to the Database?
Understand service readiness, healthchecks, and depends_on in Docker Compose when an app starts before its database is ready.
Why SOLID Principles Changed the Way I Write Code
A practical look at SOLID principles and how they help organize responsibilities, dependencies, and maintainable application code.
Understanding Linux Starts with the Big Picture
Understand Linux through the relationship between applications, user space, the kernel, system calls, and hardware.
What I’ll write about
Go & backend engineering
APIs, concurrency, authentication, and building services in Go.
Databases & systems
PostgreSQL, transactions, caching, queues, and reliability.
Building & learning
Full-stack development, project decisions, and lessons from the process.