I just finished reading Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, and can’t recommend it enough – it definitely deserved to be a New York Times bestseller. It’s a great yarn, but it was also eye-opening and provocative.

The book is an autobiographical account by Vance (who’s only 35) of his journey from a rough, rough upbringing in hillbilly America to a university education ending with Yale Law School. I appreciated the empathetic writing style from the introduction, where he speaks of those he grew up around and identifies with: “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

A few years ago I learned Go by porting the server for my Gifty Weddings side gig from Python to Go. It was a fun way to learn the language, and took me about “two weeks of bus commutes” to learn Go at a basic level and port the code.

Since then, I’ve really enjoyed working with the language, and have used it extensively at work as well as on side projects like GoAWK and zztgo. Go usage at Compass.com, my current workplace, has grown significantly in the time I’ve been there – around half of our 200 plus services are written in Go.

This article describes what I think are some of the great things about Go, gives a very brief overview of the standard library, and then digs into the core language. But if you just want a feel for what real Go code looks like, skip to the HTTP server examples.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Ee equals em cee squared. Let’s try a link and some bold text. Another paragraph. Hugo seems to be working. Writing Markdown is nice.