Building Gin: Simple over Easy
Key takeaways
- In 2014 I came back from San Francisco with no plan and one useful scar: I had seen what small software teams needed from their tools.
- The answer was Fyve, a social network built around people’s interests.
- At the time, the Go web framework people kept pointing me to was Martini.
In 2014 I came back from San Francisco with no plan and one useful scar: I had seen what small software teams needed from their tools. I had spent a year building SDKs at Joypad and Tiny Spark after shipping one of my first games. Then I was back in Spain, about to start Telecommunications Engineering, and trying to decide what to build next.
The answer was Fyve, a social network built around people’s interests. I chose Go for the backend because the language felt plain in the right way. Gin started as the web framework for that product, written while I was still learning Go and still deciding what kind of engineer I wanted to be. The code lives at gin-gonic/gin.
At the time, the Go web framework people kept pointing me to was Martini. I understood why immediately. The README was small, the middleware model felt elegant, and you could get a route responding in minutes.