Speed-running has been my method of learning Go for the past week. Having learnt Python and C, I skipped some parts of A Tour of Go that I felt confident. Also, doing exercises on Exercism — Go track helps a lot!

The parts that I think I need to work on more are probably pointers (since I’ve worked with Python more than C) and choosing between _a value or pointer receiver for functions, still haven’t done much of that part.

I also found this guide, Twelve Go Best Practices, which I thinks is useful for Go learners like me. I still need to work on more apps to get these best practices in my head.

Anyway, I was just bored that I found this guide on how to build a basic RESTful API with Go and Gin. It’s fun to build some small projects to learn. Also, love how Go’s package manager is already built in with the Go CLI. If you want to install a package, just do:

go get <package name / GitHub URL>

Learning about Go’s approach to format time is interesting. Go uses a special time string value 2006-01-02 15:04:05 for its layout. You can tweak this layout string to create multiple time formats. Eg:

const layout = "2006-Jan-02"
tm, _ := time.Parse(layout, "2014-Feb-04")

const layout = "Jan 2, 2006 at 3:04pm (MST)"
tm, _ := time.Parse(layout, "Feb 4, 2014 at 6:05pm (PST)")