My only superpower is knowing what fad is going to make a stack of cash and riding it. The only thing I've actually honestly believed in and honed recently was Go programming.
I've done a wide variety of things. I try to keep two disparate things on the go. Visual Basic between 1992-2000. C# between 2002 and 2015. SunOS/Solaris admin 1995-2002. SQL Server 1999-2010. Linux admin 1998-present. Python 2005-present. Cloud infra/AWS 2012-present. Go 2015-present. I also did some random PHP and Perl things for stupid money in the 00s. Now I'm Linux, Go, Python, cloud infra.
What I really want to do is be locked in a room with a niche project I can look after until I'm dead a this point. But that ain't gonna pay the mortgage off...
I can’t take any credit for having some omniscient insight but I was lucky enough to start Java development in 1996. It pretty much gave me a career.
I too have recently started diving into Go in a more comprehensive way. Any ideas about why it seems to you right now is a good time to cash in on golang?
My best guess is the ascendence of Kubernetes has made reading Go rather instrumental; and as a by-product, writing Go seems much more approachable.
Not GP, but: Critical mass. Accepted in many domains as a valid first class solution. Memory safe. Has that depth of modules now that you can `go get` most things off the shelf. Easy to get a team up to speed, leading to wide adoption.
It is like the Python of statically compiled languages to me, but with way more safety rails and things you need as your code base grows.
There is just demand for it in general from what I see.
I'm not really cashing in on it. It has become my sidearm. I think that's the best way to describe it. When I want to solve a problem it's just there, trustworthy, reliable and efficient.
What it does is allow me to circumvent demotivating and productivity draining pain which is seen elsewhere which is pretty much summed up as: shitty build tools, runtime environments, libraries, containerisation, IDEs, concurrency approaches, test frameworks.
Really it's a tool that allows me to actually get stuff done.
It's pretty much what I've wanted for years: a memory safe, GC'ed C with a stdlib that wasn't conceived in the 70s.