Introduction

Welcome to the course Build Cloud Apps in Go. 😊 I'm Markus, your teacher.

I'm building this course because I want to teach you how to become a Go cloud developer. Of course, being a cloud developer can mean a lot of things! But there are many of those things that you'll see again and again across different projects, and I want to focus on those parts that you'll also use again and again.

I've tried to make this course a little different than other courses you might find. I like writing in an informal, conversational language, but at the same time keeping the content short, sweet, and full of useful information. I hope I'm striking the right balance for you.

(I also have a pretty dry, Scandinavian sense of humour, for which I apologize in advance.)

There's nothing informal about the code we'll be writing, though. It's fully professional, production-ready, idiomatic Go, so it's something you can use in your work the minute you've read it.

I want you to succeed

I want you to imagine yourself after you've taken this course. You've worked hard. Put in your precious time to learn what I have to offer. Read the content, done the programming, finished the quizzes. And now, you've gotten some new skills that you can use in your Go programming career. On top of that, you've built a web app that you can use as a foundation for your next cloud project.

You feel good about that. You've put on your party hat, and little children dance around you, singing, throwing flower petals. Okay, maybe not that last part with the dancing, but definitely the party hat. 🥳

This is what I want, too. I want you to finish the course and learn everything in it, so you can build great new web apps. In theory, I could be happy when you've paid the money for the course and then never look at it again. But I won't be. If you only get a third way through and then give up or forget about it, I've failed as a teacher.

I promise I will do the best I can to lead you through the course. In return, I want you to promise that you'll try really hard to learn. Learning new material isn't easy, and failing is human, but if you don't try at all you will definitely not succeed.

So press the button below, and we have a deal.

How to learn

Learning is hard. But there are ways to make it easier. I'm using a learning method called spaced, interleaved retrieval to teach you better. What does that mean?

• Retrieval means that I will ask you to remember what you've learned. This can be hard, but when it's hard it sticks in your brain better than when it's really easy.
• Spaced means that the retrieval doesn't happen immediately after you've learned, but after some time has passed. This makes it harder to remember what you've learned, and as you now know, then it works better.
• Interleaved means that the retrieval is on a different topic than the one you just learned, maybe two or three topics ago. Again, this makes it harder to remember, and then it works better.

So in this course, you'll be asked to remember what you've learned previously, but not the usual "quiz at the end of the chapter" you might know from books. I'll check regularly that you still remember what I taught a while ago. Then you can always go back and re-read if there's something you've forgotten.

And of course, we'll be programming a lot, so you'll learn by doing as well.

Learning still takes effort, but we'll make it as easy and fun as possible!

What now?

Okay, enough introduction. Let's get started with our project!