Go Development Patterns

When to Use

• Building Go services or CLI applications
• Implementing job scheduling or task orchestration
• Integrating with Docker API
• Building LDAP/Active Directory clients
• Designing resilient systems with retry logic
• Setting up comprehensive test suites

Required Workflow

For comprehensive reviews, ALWAYS invoke these related skills:

1. Security audit - Invoke /netresearch-skills-bundle:security-audit for OWASP analysis, vulnerability assessment, and security patterns
2. Enterprise readiness - Invoke /netresearch-skills-bundle:enterprise-readiness for OpenSSF Scorecard, SLSA compliance, supply chain security
3. GitHub project setup - Invoke /netresearch-skills-bundle:github-project for branch protection, rulesets, CI workflow validation

A Go development review is NOT complete until all related skills have been executed.

Core Principles

Type Safety

• Avoid: interface{} (use any), sync.Map, scattered type assertions, reflection, errors.As with pre-declared variables
• Prefer: Generics [T any], errors.AsType[T] (Go 1.26), concrete types, compile-time verification
• Modernize: Run go fix ./... after Go upgrades to apply automated modernizers

Consistency

• One pattern per problem domain
• Match existing codebase patterns
• Refactor holistically or not at all

Conventions

• Errors: lowercase, no punctuation (errors.New("invalid input"))
• Naming: ID, URL, HTTP (not Id, Url, Http)
• Error wrapping: fmt.Errorf("failed to process: %w", err)

References

Load these as needed for detailed patterns and examples:

Reference	Purpose
references/architecture.md	Package structure, config management, middleware chains
references/logging.md	Structured logging with log/slog, migration from logrus
references/cron-scheduling.md	go-cron patterns: named jobs, runtime updates, context, resilience
references/resilience.md	Retry logic, graceful shutdown, context propagation
references/docker.md	Docker client patterns, buffer pooling
references/ldap.md	LDAP/Active Directory integration
references/testing.md	Test strategies, build tags, table-driven tests
references/linting.md	golangci-lint v2, staticcheck, code quality
references/api-design.md	Bitmask options, functional options, builders
references/fuzz-testing.md	Go fuzzing patterns, security seeds
references/mutation-testing.md	Gremlins configuration, test quality measurement
references/makefile.md	Standard Makefile interface for CI/CD
references/modernization.md	Go 1.26 modernizers, go fix, errors.AsType[T], wg.Go()

Quality Gates

Run these checks before completing any review:

golangci-lint run --timeout 5m    # Linting
go vet ./...                       # Static analysis
staticcheck ./...                  # Additional checks
govulncheck ./...                  # Vulnerability scan
go test -race ./...                # Race detection

Stdlib Vulnerability Fixes

When govulncheck reports stdlib vulnerabilities: check fix version via vuln.go.dev, update go X.Y.Z in go.mod, run go mod tidy. Use a PR branch for repos with branch protection.

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Contributing: Submit improvements to https://github.com/netresearch/go-development-skill