On Monday 06/11/2023, the Jamescape Software Development Team took part in a company-wide Hackday. The goal of the day was to become familiar with the Go language by developing a small project.
At the start of the day, we all decided on our own projects to create, bearing in mind most of us had limited to no experience in Go, but the purpose of the day was to learn it.
The project I decided on was a Plugin Request Response application. The main idea being it receives a request with data and then finds the relevant plugin by referencing a MongoDB database to finally send that data to the found plugin.
We stopped halfway through the day for a pizza lunch and to discuss our progress and any issues we were facing. Having no experience with Go myself I definitely found it quite a challenge at first, especially during the early parts of the day when trying to understand Go and how to structure my project with it. However, after identifying where I was confused, I seeked out some clarification on specific points from Alfie (our Chief Technology Officer), and as a result, I was able to make much faster progress for the rest of the day.
As we had not finished our projects, the team agreed to finish them in our own time and then present them to each other once they were finished. Using time outside of the Hackday, I was able to get my project to a working state by receiving an API call and searching a MongoDB database with the API request data. It is now ready for a presentation and demo.
After this experience I feel much more confident in my Go and MongoDB knowledge, many of the challenges I faced were due to a lack of familiarity with the language, however, after working through and overcoming the challenges I faced, I have undoubtedly learnt to be more comfortable with Go.
Speaking with my colleagues, they all felt a similar way and are now much more confident with Go. As a mostly asynchronous and hybrid team, it was great to spend a day in the same room and tackle a new challenge together.