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Comment by joncalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I want to have 20+ exercises by the time the course is complete. There are about 13 planned as of now, so if you have suggestions or topics that you think would make good Go programming exercises I'd love to hear them =D

EDIT: And in other news, a few people have reported the welcome email going to their spam so if it happens to you please let me know and I'll continue looking into why it is happening.

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Image Processing and Analysis.

Goroutines, as well as the image package, are well suited to parallel operations on bitmap data right out of the bag. From simple texture synthesis routines such as sine-wave plasma generation or mandelbrot set fractals. To advanced state-of-the-art techniques like super-resolution image enhancement and frequency domain analysis. Golang is great for image science. Especially parallel operations on separable kernels.

And it makes for a fun exercise as well ;)

+1 Image Processing + Video stream frame processing

I'm not opposed to doing something in this space, but it is an area I have pretty much zero experience in.

Can you recommend any language agnostic resources or really anything else that would help me get started in exploring this as a potential exercise idea?

> Image Processing and Analysis.

I know from reading many programming books and blog posts over the years that this is a popular topic. However, if you go down this route, please try to provide an alternative exercise which doesn't rely on visual elements to make its point. Speaking as a blind coder, image processing might be all about the numbers, but when you can't see the result of the code you've written or even conceptually understand the idea it tends to take the wind out of your sails.

Since it's often related, audio processing. As an example, maybe removing ad breaks from podcasts? I don't know how reasonable that would be as I haven't researched it, but could be a fun challenging project.

Something that is kind of unique to Go is it's crypto libraries. Using the crypto libraries in some useful way would be interesting.

A cool one might be using the golang.org/x/crypto/ssh to ssh around, and send shell commands (i.e. building your own automation framework based on ssh keys)

I like the idea of using a crypto lib, but it will probably take some thought and experimentation to figure out what will fit into roughly a ~1hr exercise. That is always the hard part - not picking something too large.

Go's crypto libs are pretty well made, and the ssh libs are less crypto and more "here's an interface similar to os/exec that lets you run commands on a remote system"

Why limit the complexity/interestingness of everything to always fit into a single hour? These seem to be aimed at people who have finished introductory material and are potentially looking for (semi-)/nontrivial material. If you're married to the idea of ~1hr segments, you can always split them into parts of a series.

I'm not stuck on 1hr segments, and I am willing to split exercises up, but only when it makes sense. For an example of this, see exercises 4 & 5 - the fifth one uses the code from the fourth.

What I am weary of is a single exercise that isn't easy to break up. Or one that even if you break it up, each exercise isn't entertaining or educational enough to stand on its own.

I also prefer having exercises (at least for this course) that can be completed in someones spare time - say in an afternoon or evening - and if an exercise takes me 1hr to code in a screencast, chances are it will take someone newer to the language longer and that doesn't account for time learning about new std libraries, googling questions, etc. In short, a 1hr exercise for me might be a 3+ hour exercise for some students.

Given Java and .NET crypto libraries, and their provider infrastructure, I fail to see what is so unique to Go's crypto libraries.

Can you please explain why do you think that it's unique?

You have two SPF TXT records on calhoun.io, causing SPF to fail:

"v=spf1 include:mailgun.org include:servers.mcsv.net ~all"

"v=spf1 include:servers.mcsv.net ?all"

Get rid of the second one. Also, setup DMARC: https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/

Edit: Looks fixed now!

Thanks!

EDIT: It looks like most things are fixed, but any outlook/hotmail emails aren't going out. Sorry everyone!

I'm trying to deal w/ the issue but it looks like it has to do with an IP Mailgun uses being blocked by MSFT.

tried to register but not getting any emails back

Well that is annoying :(

Can you check your spam folder for anything from jon@calhoun.io?

If you keep having issues email me (same email as above) and I'll manually get you a login link.

thanks for the response, i got a link using a different email address, my Hotmail one just wont get anything back, i watched the first vid(the quizz program) and liked the way you explained things,very clear, i have basic knowledge of golang but need practice to refresh and learn more! , im also interested in web development with Go, do you think these vids are good preparation material for your web development stuff? like a roadmap kind of thing? Thanks, keep up the good work!

If you are getting value out of Gophercises I don't see any reason why the web dev course would be out of your reach. There are definitely exercises in Gophercises that are much harder than anything we code in a vast majority of the web dev course.

The only thing that might make the web dev course harder is the fact that we end up with a much larger codebase, but none of the individual code is significantly more challenging in any way.

You need to combine both SPF records into one record that allows both sources.

Aside from that, since you're aiming at beginners I would connect "gopher" to the Go language sooner than three screens down the page.

Noted. Thanks for the feedback :)

A WebSockets / realtime / push/pull exercise would be a good addition.

So like a simple, no-auth, realtime chat app using websockets to push data to each client? That sounds feasible in an hour.

A realtime chat without auth but with private messages or multiple rooms. Basically the user will pick a nickname, click next and then be able to chat on a general or create/join a room.

Really Nice step, I created a small course to create a flappy bird game step-by-step for my co-workers which I presented at Golab conference in Italy. This was also made into "Just for Func" series by Francesc. It was intended to be really simple for beginners, and I could help it make it better if you decide to use it :)

https://github.com/shabinesh/flappy

I recall seeing at least one video in this series :)

I love the idea and your work here, but I'm a little skeptical of doing something so similar since it won't add a ton of value with Francesc's videos already out there.

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