Go in a Django World

Stop Ὂing the Bed
Go in a Django World
25 October 2013
Akshay Shah
Resident Gopher, Hearsay Social

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This Talk
Today, I'm going to convince you that
Python shouldn't be our only server-side tool
One of those tools should be Go
Grab some ἷ and strap in.

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We Ὂ the Bed Constantly
Python & Django are great, but they don't do much to prevent the quality problems
we're experiencing. In the hour before I wrote this slide, we had 1329 AttributeErrors in
production.
This is fixable in Python, but we should be free to choose other tools if they're more
appropriate - especially for loosely-coupled services.

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TANSTAAFL
As economists say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Python & Django are great
at some things, but they're not perfect.
Good Bad
expressive slow
ὐ included clumsy concurrency & parallelism
duck-typing runtime errors
minimal ceremony poor encapsulation
exceptions exceptions
In general, we work around Python's weak points with conventions and tests.

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Conventions Live Outside the Code
From @rbm's bug triage email this week:
As code quantity, code complexity, and number of developers increase, conventions
scale poorly. There's too much tribal knowledge.
Said differently, Murphy's Law always wins.

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Tests Are Work
Testing should be part of any modern application. That said, writing tests is work.
We need lots of tests to be safe (for the class of errors we're talking about)
If we write tests like that, what's the net gain in development velocity?
When Python & Django are doing a lot of heavy lifting for us, it's worth writing enough
tests to be confident in our code.
For tasks that don't leverage much of Django, we should use tools that do more to
support us.

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Pick Your Poison ☠

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Go: Static Typing That Feels Dynamic

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Google Juice
At a high level, Go is
Open source
Statically typed and compiled to machine code
Designed for writing clean server code at scale
Feature-wise, it has
Great concurrency primitives
An unusual take on object orientation
ὐ included (but different)
It's a language for working programmers, not researchers or academics.

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Hello, World
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Inference Makes Types Feel Dynamic
It also makes refactoring much easier.
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Compiler-Checked Duck Typing
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Concurrency
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Error Handling
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Tooling
You've already seen most of the core language. Included in the standard
distribution:
Cross-compiling, runtime race detection: go build
Source-driven dependency management: go get
Unambiguous, tooling-enforced formatting: go fmt
Linting: go vet
Source-driven documentation: go doc
Integrated testing framework: go test
Production-ready webserver, routing, and templating.
Go takes tooling seriously.

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Questions about Go?

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Just Add Code
If you're interested, the infrastructure is ready.
golang repo (https://github.com/hearsaycorp/golang)
with githooks.
Chef recipe (already installed on dev machines)
Jenkins job to build, lint, test, and archive packages
Deployment from S3

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Nobody Likes Ὂ In the Bed

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Resources
Pro tip: search for "golang," not "go."
How to Write Go Code (http://golang.org/doc/code.html)
The interactive tour (http://tour.golang.org/#1)
Effective Go (http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html)
Concurrency Is Not Parallelism (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso)
There are Django-style mega-frameworks, Flask-style micro-toolkits, BDD and xUnit-
style testing, and database-agnostic ORMs available
Plugins for emacs, vim, Sublime Text, JetBrains, and Eclipse available

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Thank you
Akshay Shah
Resident Gopher, Hearsay Social
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
http://akshayshah.org (http://akshayshah.org)
@akshayshah (http://twitter.com/akshayshah)

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Go in a Django World

Go in a Django World

Akshay Shah

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