Reading List
This page is auto-generated from Github Actions workflow that runs every day at night and fetches the 5 latest articles from each of my favorite blogs.
Alex Pliutau - Blog
Recent content on Alex Pliutau - Blog
Latest posts
Books I Read in 2025
Books I read in 2025, in no particular order. In the past I used the e-ink readers, but in the last few years I prefer to read and collect the physical books. This is not that expensive if you buy second hand books. This year I found a great service called bookbot.de where you can find many books locally.
Running MinIO locally with Docker Compose
When developing applications that interact with object storage like AWS S3, it’s useful to have a local setup that mimics the real service. MinIO is an open-source S3-compatible object storage server that fits perfectly for this purpose.
About
Hi, thanks for visiting my personal website! 
 My name is Alex Pliutau. I am currently employed as a Staff Software Engineer at Entyre Care. 
 I write this blog in my personal time to share my experience and knowledge about software development, Golang, and few other topics. I also write a newsletter packagemain.tech as well as make some videos on YouTube .
Projects
Here are some of the projects I work on in my free time: 
 practice-go 
 A collection of Go programming challenges with tests and benchmarks. 
 paypal
.gitignore everything by default
We’ve all been there. You’re working on a project, making commits, and suddenly realize you’ve been committing .DS_Store files, node_modules , IDE configuration files, or other junk that shouldn’t be in your repository. Then comes the embarrassing cleanup: adding these files to .gitignore , removing them from the repository history, and hoping no one noticed.
Deploy Hugo static site to Hetzner
Recently I ditched my AWS account and moved my personal small projects to a Hetzner VPS, what a nice feeling tinkering with your own server again! As a part of this process I also had to change how I deploy this blog, so I thought I would share my setup in case anyone else is interested.
Auto-generated Reading List
I don’t know about you, but I love the RSS feed, and over the years, I’ve accumulated various blogs that I follow. However, it’s hard to keep track of them all, as I don’t use any RSS clients. So, I decided to create a GitHub Action that automatically generates and publishes a reading list from the RSS feeds of the blogs I follow.
Minesweeper with Raylib Go Bindings
I remember when I was in school and didn’t have yet a PC at home (probably year ~2000), I would visit my Mom’s office to play some videogames on her work PC :) It was some Pentium and didn’t have many games in the beginning, but Minesweeper was always there as it came with Windows installation. Great times btw!
My first Zig program - zigping
For me the best way to learn something new is to actually build something with it. Yes, there is some hype around Zig nowadays (Ghostty, Bun are build in Zig), but don’t listen to it, go try it out and see for yourself if it solves your problem or not.
Map with Expiration in Go
In some cases your application doesn’t need Redis, and internal in-memory map with locks and expiration will suffice. 
 For example you already know the size of the map and you don’t need to store a lot of data. Use cases could be IP rate limiting, or any other short-lived data.
My first experience with OCaml
Recently I’ve been motivated to learn more about functional programming and the name OCaml came up quite a few times. I have seen some praise about it from the people I follow on social media and decided to give it a try. I finally finished a small project in OCaml and would like to share my first impressions while the memory is still fresh.
Centrally Collecting Events from Go Microservices
In the beginning at Solsten our engineering team focused on building products, tools, services but we never had the time to measure what was going on in our platform (it was an early-stage startup). Even though we had a feeling of what was right or not thanks to our customers, the pain grew too strong and forced our department to allocate time in order to measure things.
An Ode to Logging

 
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 Oh, log, a nerdy scribe,
 In you, all errors hide.
 To write it well - not an easy quest,
 Let's see…
My first experience with Gleam Language
Over the past few months, I saw a growing amount of posts on X about the Gleam language (probably the X algorithm doing its thing), and decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed, with few exceptions.
Snake game in Go using Ebiten

 Ebiten is an open source game library in Go for building 2D games that can be ran across multiple platforms. Ebiten games work on desktop, web browsers (through WebAssembly), as well as on Mobile and even on Nintendo Switch.
Logging in Go using logrus
Logging is a very essential part of large software, it’s hard to overstate the importance of logging, be it performance metrics logging, error logging, or debug logging for troubleshooting later.
Engineering Management Books
We live in the world where there are so many offerings of information in all possible formats: podcasts, videos, blogs, etc. But reading a good book is something that you’ll never regret.
Writing testable Go code

 When I say “testable code”, what I mean is code that can be easily programmatically verified. We can say that code is testable when we don’t have to change the code itself when we’re adding a unit test to it. It doesn’t matter if you’re following test-driven development or not, testable code makes your program more flexible and maintainable, due to its…
Writing REST API Client in Go
API clients are very helpful when you’re shipping your REST APIs to the public. And Go makes it easy, for you as a developer, as well as for your users, thanks to its idiomatic design and type system. But what defines a good API client?
Mounting Google Cloud Storage bucket to Kubernetes Pod

 You may ask why doing this if we can use a PersistentVolume? Though there may be multiple scenarios when mounting a GCS bucket to you Kubernetes Pod is a good option:
Google Home Action to manage your Kubernetes cluster
I always wanted to find a good use case of Google Home to make some DevOps tasks funnier. For example voice deployments, system metrics, etc. Since I use Kubernetes a lot, I thought it would be fun to control it via voice commands.
Rate Limiting HTTP Requests in Go based on IP address
If you are running HTTP server and want to rate limit requests to the endpoints, you can use well-maintained tools such as github.com/didip/tollbooth . But if you’re building something very simple, it’s not that hard to implement it on your own.
Building Desktop App in Go using Wails

 This post is a text version of packagemain #6: Building Desktop App in Go using Wails video. 
 As we all know, Go is mostly used to build APIs, web backends, CLI tools. But what’s interesting is that Go can be used in places we were not expecting to see it.
Database Migrations with Go and Kubernetes
Applications with database layer mostly need to execute database migration as part of its deployment process. Usually, running migrations is the first step when deploying the application.
Google Cloud Functions in Go

 Earlier this month Google Cloud Functions team finally announced beta support of Go, the runtime uses Go 1.11, which includes go modules as we know.
Ultimate ClickHouse Helm Chart

 Seems like ClickHouse is experiencing growth in industries like IoT, Web Analytics, AdTech, Log Management, because of its robustness with big amounts of data.
Table driven tests in Go

 In practice-go we often use table driven testing to be able to test all function scenarios. For example the FindAnagrams() function returns us a list of anagrams found in the dictionary for given input. To be able to test this function properly we need to test multiple cases, like empty input, valid input, invalid input, etc. We could right different asserts to make it, but it’s much…
Getting Started with OAuth2 in Go

 This is a text version of this video: packagemain #11: Getting started with OAuth2 in Go . 
 Getting started with OAuth2 in Go 
 Authentication usually is very important part in any application. You can always implement your own authentication system, but it will require a lot of work, registration, forgot password form, etc. That’s why OAuth2 was created, to allow user to log…
Building a Slack Bot with Go and Wit.ai
If you’re looking to create AI agents and bots without any coding, Runbear makes it super easy by offering a no-code platform that integrates seamlessly with Slack, MS Teams, HubSpot, and Zendesk, allowing you to set up custom AI assistants in just minutes.
Transitioning from Engineer to Engineering Manager

 A couple of months ago I moved from a Team Lead position to being an engineering manager at Wizeline Vietnam on a small sized team. I’ve found that this role change comes with a mindset change. Some things that mattered before when I was an individual contributor (writing good code, applying best engineering practices) became less important. On the other hand, new things became more…
Face Detection in Go using OpenCV and MachineBox

 This is a text version of this video: packagemain #5: Face Detection in Go using OpenCV and MachineBox .
Go tools are awesome

 Yes, they are. And that’s why I love Go. Almost all important tools come together with Go installation, but there are also some you can install additionally depending on your needs: golint, errcheck, etc.
Slack Stranger Bot in Go

 I am enjoying writing programs in a short time, like in a Hackathon way. Here in Vietnam we don’t have Hackathons often, so yesterday I decided to make one for myself with a time limit in 3 hours. The goal was to build/deploy something that will work and people can try it. I decided to go with Bot for Slack (or another messenger in the future).
Benchmarking gRPC+Protobuf vs HTTP+JSON in Go

 Simplest possible solution for communication between services is to use JSON over HTTP. Though JSON has many obvious advantages - it’s human readable, well understood, and typically performs well - it also has its issues. In the case of internal services the structured formats, such as Google’s Protocol Buffers, are a better choice than JSON for encoding data.
Garbage Collection in Git

 To understand git garbage collector, we need to understand how branches work. Branches are just pointers to commits that move whenever a new commit is created.
Using different Git emails
Usually at work and at home we use different Git name/email pairs, or even per project. Pushing with correct email guarantees that your commits will be authored with a correct user identity.
Working with DB datetime/date columns in Go
This post shows how to work with DATETIME / DATE database columns and use Go standard time.Time avoiding manual string parsing. This article contains examples using 2 packages: database/sql and github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql .
Multi-stage Dockerfile for Golang application

 A common workaround for building Golang application in Docker is to have 2 Dockerfiles - one to perform a build and another to ship the results of the first build without tooling in the first image. It called Builder Pattern .
Useful Git global config and ignore rules

 I am working with git every single day, from different machines and accounts. And all these hosts have the same global git configuration. I sync it using tiny bash script.
Different ways to block Go runtime forever
The design of Go’s runtime assumes that the programmer is responsible for detecting when to terminate a goroutine and when to terminate the program. Normally, a program can be terminated in a normal way by calling os.Exit or by returning from the main() function. There are a lot of ways of blocking runtime forever, I will show all of them for better understanding of blocking in Go.
How to build Go plugin with data inside
Go 1.8 gives us a new tool for creating shared libraries, called plugins! This new plugin buildmode is currently only supported on Linux. But what if we build plugin with data in binary format inside? So we can ship only one .so file.
How to use go-bindata with html/template
What is go-bindata and why do we need it? 
 go-bindata converts any text or binary file into Go source code, which is useful for embedding data into Go programs. So you can build your whole project into 1 binary file for easier delivery.
How to separate Unit and Integration tests in Go
Usually integration tests take long time, because they’re doing real requests to real system. And it’s not necessary to run them every time we type go test . For example we have Golang client to work with PayPal SDK, it has some exported functions to send data to PayPal, then parse response and handle errors. So I wrote test functions to check that our client works properly with the…
How to mock exec.Command in Go
In some of my projects we have code that needs to run external executables, and it’s very difficult to test them, especially when your function is based on some kind of stdout parcing. So how to mock these commands in Go? Let’s check how this goal is achieved in os/exec package. In exec_test.go we can see a helperCommand . When running go tests, the go tool compiles an executable from…
Swaggerize your APIs
Swagger UI is a great tool and a must have for any respectable API project. It has an intuitive design, all endpoints can be tested from the interface. For example, let’s have a look at Kubernetes API , where endpoints are grouped by version, and everything is accessible in easy way. In this post I’ll show how to build it together with your API written in Go.
Go templates. Helper to render a struct
The Go language comes with a powerful built-in template engine. In Go, we have the template package to help handle templates. We can use functions like Parse , ParseFile and Execute to load templates from plain text or files, then evaluate the dynamic parts. Also it’s possible to create user-defined functions and call it from templates.
UUID without dependencies in Go
Today I saw that the size of my vendor/ folder in Golang project is around 150M. I am using glide there and there are 24 dependencies (it’s a program with multiple data storage connectors, notifications, etc.), so I decided to review it and reduce the amount of 3rd party libraries.
Concurrency. Data race
What does data race mean in Golang? Data race is a common mistake in concurrent systems. A data race occurs when two goroutines access the same variable concurrently and at least one of the accesses is a write. It’s really hard to recognize it without specific tools or without an eagle eye, because when you run a program it’s always a chance that you won’t see your mistake or it will be very…
Working with DB nulls in Golang
This post shows how to marshall NULL values from the database into Go struct and how to avoid mistakes during fetching optional values with SELECT query. I’ll show standard types sql.NullString, sql.NullInt64, etc types.