The Best Golang Blogs for Learning Golang

Published on Jan 10, 2021 in technical-blogs by Zara Cooper
11 minute read

Go recently turned eleven, so you can imagine how much the language and its ecosystem have evolved through the years. A strongly typed language, it’s become increasingly popular with its garbage collection and concurrency support. It’s massively performant, scalable, and resource-use efficient. Small wonder that Go is applied across a multitude of areas these days, including web applications, microservices, cloud computing, web servers, and other systems/tools. Each of these areas has at least one strong Go blog associated with it, often many more.

One of the best ways to learn Golang is to find a Golang blog that resonates with your area of interest and specifically covers Go. You can also subscribe to one Golang blog or more via email or RSS to stay on top of the latest Golang news, tutorials, project ideas, and example code. This is important since there are constant changes to the language, its tools, and the community.

In this article, we’ll look at blogs written by Go users, contributors, and educators about the various ways they are making use of the language. You can use these to your advantage to learn Go by example.

1. A Journey With Go

A Journey with Go is a fairly new Golang blog, with its first post in 2019. It tends to stick with a concept over a series of posts explaining it in detail. Interesting series you can find on the blog cover garbage collection, the compiler, and many more. It is written by Vincent Blanchon and is hosted on Medium.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

2. Applied Go

Applied Go claims to “go beyond the Go tutorials.” In addition to its course on mastering Go, the site covers topics such as algorithms and data structures, concurrent programming, distributed computing, patterns and paradigms, among many others. You can also find screencasts that complement the posts. It’s written and maintained by Christoph Berger and a solid Go blog for understanding Golang development through example code.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

3. Ardan Labs’ Blog

Ardan Labs is a company that provides software development, consulting, & training to companies that use Go in their products. They’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies that use Go. Their blog covers Go topics in depth and explains fundamental Go concepts. Some interesting series on their blog that might be worth exploring cover Generics and Modules.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

4. Dave Cheney’s Blog

Dave Cheney is a Go project member and contributor. He’s well-known in the community and often speaks at Go conferences and events. His blog covers a lot about Go, but also discusses software design and other topics. Start exploring in the handy section about Practical Go. This section is a solid resource you can use to learn Golang before venturing into advanced Golang with other resources on his blog. For instance, he publishes advanced Golang tutorials like this and technical Golang news like this.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

5. DEV’s Go Tag

DEV is a software developer community where individuals produce content, network, and collaborate. Anyone can post their written, audio, or visual content on DEV, and developers can tag their content for other developers to follow. As of this writing, there are about 3600 posts under the Go tag, ranging across tutorials, opinion pieces, concept breakdowns, and people documenting their experiences. It’s an amazing place to learn what other Go developers are working on and how they’re using Go in the products they build.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

6. Digital Ocean’s Go Series

The DigitalOcean Community is a place for developers to share and teach one another. Not only do they produce a host of Golang tutorials that cover Digital Ocean’s own products, the site also publishes content about other technologies and languages. For example, their ongoing series about coding in Go explains a lot of fundamentals, like error handling, and breaks down how to do a host of things with Go, like setting up a local programming environment on Ubuntu. Following these tutorials might be the best way to learn Golang for cloud computing.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 4

7. Eli Bendersky’s Blog

Eli Bendersky is an open-source contributor who’s contributed to the Go language and some of its tools. His Golang blog publishes technical, programming-related content on a range of topics and is rather active; the Go tag has fifteen posts from this year alone. He recently did an educational three-part series about embedding in Go and a four-part series about implementing the Raft algorithm in Go. There are plenty of awesome Golang code examples in these series.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

8. Go By Example

Go by Example is a self-described “hands-on introduction to Go using annotated example programs.” It is not a blog per se—it’s not regularly updated with new content—but it is a web resource dedicated to simply explaining concepts in Go. It is updated as the Go language evolves and new releases are launched. It’s written and maintained by Mark McGranaghan, who has led engineering teams at Stripe and Heroku.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 2
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

The Go Web Examples blog

9. Go Web Examples

Inspired by Go By Example, Philipp Tanlak created Go Web Examples to provide “easy-to-understand code snippets on how to do web development” in Go. The site’s Golang tutorials and posts are clean and detailed and aimed specifically at Go web developers, making this one of the best blogs for Golang web development. A lot of web programming basics are covered, including middleware, WebSockets, sessions, and working with databases. Go Web Examples also provides a video course, some for free. Check out the series about how to build a Reddit clone with Go. This is one of many series with Go programming language examples specifically for web development.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 5

10. Go’s Articles Wiki

The articles section of the Go Github wiki lists a wide range of articles curated by the Go community. They cover topics ranging from security, cross platform development, testing, containers, and Docker, making this another solid Go blog for cloud computing. The section is updated regularly with new posts from a variety of authors and also includes articles in other languages, like Korean and Japanese.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

11. Golang Bot

The GolangBot Blog, written by Naveen Ramanathan, offers Golang tutorials that emphasize simplicity and offer lots of Golang code examples. Its Learn Golang series is a good place to start for detailed coverage of Go basics. The most recent posts include a comprehensive series about how to use the MySQL database and WebAssembly with Go. You can also sign up for a jobs newsletter curated by this Go blog.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

12. Golang Programs

Golang Programs exhaustively covers the essentials of Go. Their posts contain helpful solutions to common problems in Go basics as well as more advanced tutorials and concept explanations, all with detailed code, as seen in their data structures and algorithms series.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 5

13. GolangCode

GolangCode publishes how-to guides, specifically providing “quick answers to those everyday code problems, ones you know deep down but just require a quick Google anyway.” Its posts detail solutions for working with HTTP, APIs, file handling, using Goroutines, encoding, type conversions, and so much more. GolangCode is written by Edd Turtle.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 2
Technical Depth: 3
Broad Usefulness: 5

14. Gopher Academy Blog

Gopher Academy is a community organization focused on promoting Go. They also produce Gophercon, the annual Go conference in North America. Their blog publishes news about the conference, as well as a wide range of topics relevant to Go. You can also find links to their Youtube channel, for videos of previous Gophercons.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

15. Gopher Guides

Gopher Guides provides Go consultation, training, support, and audit services for companies that use Go in their products. Although the blog only has a few posts, they do a good job sharing their knowledge and experience.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

16. Hashnode’s Go Tag

Similar to DEV, Hashnode is a developer community that provides a platform for publishing free content. The community of almost 12,000 developers contribute all sorts of Go tutorials and articles to the tag, ranging from beginner-level posts to more advanced topics. Like DEV, Hashnode is a good place to learn Golang development by example and get project ideas.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

Ilija Eftimov’s blog

17. Ilija Eftimov’s Blog

Ilija Eftimov is a senior software engineer at Scribd, which uses Go. The most recent posts on his blog skew toward Go, specifically around testing. His tutorials are thorough and interesting, explaining how to accomplish goals with clear code examples. He also allows his readers to suggest topics to write about.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

18. ITNEXT’s Blog

ITNEXT is a knowledge-sharing platform for IT and software developers. They hold monthly meetups and summits where developers can pass on their expertise and experiences with technologies they use. ITNEXT also runs a Medium publication that allows developers to publish content about their favorite technologies, including multiple posts on Go. One of the best ways to learn Golang is to blog about your learnings. Even better is to get promoted on other blogs. If you learn something interesting that’s not widely written about, you can submit your post to this Golang blog and others in this list.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

19. Just For Func

Just for Func is a Golang blog with an accompanying Youtube channel to learn Golang. It’s run by Francesc Campoy, an engineering manager at Apple and a former developer advocate for Go at Google. Although the Medium blog has not been updated with new posts in a while, the YouTube version of the blog is active and contains very useful and fun videos focusing solely on Go. His introduction to SemVer, modules, and migration to modules is particularly insightful. Because of his focus on videos, this is a good resource to learn Go by example.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 4
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

20. Learn The Go Programming Language

This Go blog is just what it says on the tin, guiding you through real-world problems using Go. Posts like “Streaming IO in Go” and “Let’s Make an NTP Client in Go” are great examples. The author, Vladimir Vivien, hasn’t posted here in a while, but these posts and others he’s written on Medium are very insightful. He is also the author of Learn Go Programming.

Writing Quality: 4
Consistency: 2
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 4
Broad Usefulness: 4

The official Go blog

21. Official Go Blog

The team that develops Go uses their blog to make announcements about what they’re working on, as well as providing updates on new features, tools, releases, and news about the community. A number of their posts go in-depth, like their series dedicated to Go modules.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

22. Russ Cox’s Blog

Russ Cox is a principal engineer at Go and leads the team that develops it. While he’s written a number of posts on the official Go blog, his own blog tends to focus on thoughts and proposals he has on Go. His posts tend to be extremely detailed and delve into the nitty-gritty of Go concepts. In fact, the official Go blog often links back to his blog for concepts that need more explanation.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 3
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

23. Tit Petric’s Blog

Tit Petric has authored a number of books on Go, focusing on how to use it well in a number of applications. His blog covers topics such as performance optimization, problem solving, high traffic, high availability, virtualization, and Docker, all with meticulous examples.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 4
Longevity: 5
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

24. Tutorial Edge

Tutorial Edge posts all kinds of tutorials for computer science, frontend frameworks, web and cloud development, programming languages, and so on. Its Go section is substantial, and the posts range from beginner-friendly to more advanced, all of them well cataloged and categorized. A recent post covers getting started with functions in Go for WebAssembly. It’s maintained by Elliot Forbes.

Writing Quality: 3
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 5

25. Wandering Thoughts’ Go Topic

Chris Siebenmann works in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Although his blog, Wandering Thoughts, covers a breadth of topics, a number of his most recent posts focus on Go how-to’s and his thoughts on the language.

Writing Quality: 5
Consistency: 5
Longevity: 3
Technical Depth: 5
Broad Usefulness: 4

Conclusion

Keeping up with Go blogs is a smart way to stay exposed to how others are using Go to solve problems. There is so much Go content out there, and it’s not just limited to blogs; more and more people are turning to video and audio to share their Go content, not to mention all the Go forums and newsletters that are available.

There’s always something new to learn about Go, and better or more interesting ways to work with it are always popping up. If you know of other Go blogs we should include in this list, submit them here.

If you’ve enjoyed this, don’t miss our other Best Technical Blogs lists.

By Zara Cooper

Zara Cooper is a software developer who enjoys sharing what she learns with others. She mostly works with Angular, React, Go, and Ruby. Her interests include open source, system design, and technical writing. When she’s got time to spare, she enjoys reading a good book over a cup of hot cocoa.