Going with Mattermost!

After the incredible experience I had with folks from as well!), I decided to go with them once again for November.

Literally "going" with them this time, since their server is written in Go (I apologize for my hurtful sense of humor). During Hacktoberfest, I worked on their I got this time was related to their server, and this would be my first time working on a Go project.

Go

With absolutely no prior knowledge of Go, I made the right decision to learn it first. Fortunately, Go was super easy to get your hands on. I was genuinely amazed by the simplicity of it while being able to produce fast and reliable software. A one-hour video was all I needed to understand the basics, and I found myself pausing way less than when I learned Rust 😆.

First of all I want to spend some time to appreciate this adorably goofy gopher:

. All I had to do was implementing error handling in a single file.

.

The only obstacle I ran into was determining which log level to use. Although it was mentioned in the docs, I still found the definition ambiguous. However, after a quick search within the project, I realized that these functions always use the same log level in other places. This eliminated my doubts.

Since the functions I was working on serves static HTML pages, I also made sure a proper HTTP error code is returned when error occurs like so:

http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusInternalServerError)

That's all the work! I filed the PR and was initially a little worried, since this was my first time working with Go, but it turned out to be fine. The PR was merged just after a minor fix.

Conclusion

Overall, this was a fun and easy issue to work on. I'm glad that I picked it even if it wasn't as challenging as some other issues I've been working on. I'm always happy to learn a new language and this was an perfect excuse for that! And it was kinda awesome to be able to use it right away.