It's been a pretty hectic month, there were many things to do. Tough decisions to make and ultimately a family to consider.

Golang - GoSchool

Somewhere in July 2020, I saw an advert on linkedin from GoSchool seeking applicants to be trained in Golang. I had an simple technical interview shortly in August 2020, initially my first thoughts after the interview was that I blew it. Because I couldn't complete the task required completely.

The Technical Interview Experience

It was my very first actual Technical Interview Experience, I had nearly forgotten how to code in Python so it was a fight or flight situation. As I was at that point of time learning Javascript, I couldn't recall some of the exact syntax.

I was given a set of months for rainfall measurements in a list. I needed to create a solution to be able to calculate the average rainfall and to find out on the total days where there was no rainfall per month.

This was my rudimentary solution. While it wasn't something I was proud of, at least it could work...somehow..

About GoSchool

It is a new school in partnership with NP, indorse, opennodes. Ngee Ann Polytechnic under their SGUnited programme which is supported by Skillsfuture, will be the overall trainers of the rigorous programme spanning 4 months (full-time) sort of like a bootcamp and thereafter graduating there will be a traineeship component (4-months) with their hiring partners Shopee,Garena, foodpanda and Zalora. Furthermore, Skillsfuture has been really supportive and they provide a monthly stipend from the start of the course which I think is a timely gesture because of the current COVID-19 situation.

GoSchool - Go Basics

The first day was some administrative stuff, as the COVID restrictions prevented classes to be taught physically. All of us were onboarded to their teaching platform on Microsoft Teams. There was some hiccups to the system, but it was resolved shortly thereafter.

For the first day, we learnt the basics of Golang. My first take of Golang, was that if you've learnt C, C++, Javascript before you will have an easier time understanding the concepts. Golang is like a mix of all the best stuff you find in C, C++, Javascript. Its a tedious language because it is statically typed, and I find that it gives you more control over what you want to do without the complexity of C or C++.

Usually you start go with the header.

Then you import the libraries.

and finally the main function.

When you combine all of these with the basic print Hello World!

Quite easy right!?! Well no it gets more complicated when you start to learn the the slices,structs,pointers,channels. Thankfully the lectures Ching Yun and Kheng Hian are really good. With every topic covered, there was a practice component where you have to solve the problems by creating a Golang Program which really reinforced the learning.

Not that it wasn't obvious enough, but anyone who does programming knows that you need to practice typing it on a consistent basis to be able to learn it better.

Closing Words

With this brief introduction, I will stop for now and continue on the next term where we learn Go Advanced.