On 8th January, Jon sent an email to his newsletter asking folks if they’d like a code review.

The response was amazing, and we got a couple of hundred submissions. Some were much too big and too complicated, for the exercise that we wanted to do, but we both loved this submission as it was small enough that we felt we could read through the whole thing and understand it, but also it was a really interesting use of Go.

You can watch the code review here. I included a small write up below.

The Go Code Review Experiment

The submitter made a snake game using Go. The style was very reminiscent of the applications I used to build using Java Swing, and playing around with it was very nostalgic. I also had just not seen Go used to create games beyond this excellent blog post from ThreeDotLabs.

The discussion was a lot of fun and the submitter was really happy with the feedback:

Thanks to you and Matt for this code review! It’s very useful. Appreciate it. Good advices. and not only for Golang but for programming in general. Great job! Keep going!

We released the video above to some folks we trust and got some helpful constructive feedback such as:

• We should cover less and go deeper on the stuff we do cover, perhaps make some of the refactors.
• I need to make my font larger.

So what happens next? Will you make more of these?

It sort of depends on the reception we receive. If you think this is interesting content, please let us know. Although we can do a lot to improve production quality, it takes quite a lot of work to put these together so we only want to do it if there is folks who will watch and is it helpful for their learning.

I want to thank all my friends over on Twitter(X?) who watched this early to give feedback. I’d also like to thank Dim567 for allowing us the opportunity to review their code. Finally, I’d like to thank Jon.

If you enjoyed this video and want more great (and free) content. Please check out Gophercises and Mastering Go With Goland