why i switched to go for backend services

after years of writing python and node.js services, we made the switch to go for all new backend work. here’s what convinced us — and what we wish we’d known earlier.

the tipping point

our python services were fine until they weren’t. once traffic grew past a certain point, the concurrency model became a bottleneck. we needed something that could handle thousands of concurrent connections without the overhead.

what go got right

• goroutines — lightweight concurrency without callback hell
• static typing — catches bugs at compile time, not at 3am in production
• single binary deployment — no dependency management on the server
• standard library — net/http alone covers most web service needs

what surprised us

the learning curve was shorter than expected. most of our team was productive within a week. the hardest adjustment was letting go of inheritance and embracing composition.

the tradeoffs

go isn’t perfect. error handling is verbose. generics arrived late. the ecosystem is smaller than node’s. but for our use case — high-throughput api services — it’s been worth every tradeoff.

the boring choice is often the right one.