Shadowing Practice: Build a Microservice with Go #1 - Getting Started - Learn English Speaking with Video

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All right then gang, so in this series you're going to learn how to make a microservice with Go

and a framework called Qi or Kai or however else you want to pronounce it.

And to teach you how to do this I've brought in

the YouTuber Dreams of Code who's got a bunch of really nice videos about Go, Python, Rust and other subjects as well.

His videos are all really slick and informative so definitely check out his channel.

The link is down below the video.

Anyway without further ado So let the tutorial begin.

Go is a modern programming language that prides itself on being simple to use whilst remaining powerful and performant.

Because of this, Go is a language that is popular for building many different types of software, such as command line tools, network applications and microservices.

In this series, we're going to walk through building an API microservice in Go from start to finish.

By the end, you'll learn how to spin up a basic microservice API, which connects to a Redis database and is responsible for creating, reading, updating and deleting our data type.

So without further ado, let's get started.

Before we can begin writing code, we'll need to make sure we have Go installed on our system.

I'll be using macOS for the majority of this video, but it should be similar in other operating systems as well.

If you head on over to the Golang website, you should be able to find installation instructions for your operating system.

If you're okay with a basic installation, I recommend following the instructions found here.

For me however, I'm going to use a tool called Goenv, which allows us to manage multiple versions of Go on the same system.

So I'm going to show you how to get that set up.

To install Goenv, you can either follow the instructions on GitHub or use your operating systems package manager, if you have one of course.

For macOS, it's as simple as using brew install goenv.

Once Goenv is installed, run the following line to ensure that it loads every time your terminal starts, and then restart your terminal window.

You can test that everything is working okay with the following command.

If this doesn't work, then you may have missed a step.

With everything set up, we're now ready to install Go.

What's nice about using Goenv is that you're able to install the same version as I am in this tutorial, as it's very likely that a more recent version of Go is currently available at the time you're watching this.

You're probably okay to use the latest version of Go as the developers try hard to remain backwards compatible.

However, there's never a guarantee of that being the case.

So feel free to use the same version as I am in the video if the most recent one doesn't work.

To install Go, type in the following command.

This will install version 1.20.5.

After that, we can run the following command to set the global version of Go in Goenv.

Finally, you can test that everything is working correctly by running the go version command, which should print out 1.20.5.

Now we're ready to start building.

By the way, in case you haven't noticed, I pretty much use the terminal for most of my development.

I also use NeoVim as my editor of choice, but you may feel more comfortable using something like VS Code or another graphical editor.

The CLI commands that I use in this video should work the same for you, however, and so you may need to jump into the terminal at certain points.

First things first, we'll need a directory to store our project.

I'm going to create mine under projects slash orders API.

Feel free to choose a different directory for yourself however.

Once inside we now need to actually initialize our go project.

We can do this by running go mod init.

You'll need to add the project repo as the final argument.

This can be any git repo, such as github or gitlab.

Here I'm specifying my github repository.

Additionally this repo doesn't need to exist at this stage, you can always create it later and you can always rename this if you need to.

GoMod is basically Go's dependency management solution, similar to Node's npm or Ruby's gems.

However, unlike those systems, it's actually decentralized and works off of git, and therefore each Go project is specified by the git repo it relates to.

After running GoMod in it, you should see a go.mod file inside of your project.

If we open this up, we can actually see that this has our project repo inside of it.

Simple stuff.

Next, it's a good idea to initialize Git so

that we can actually have good hygiene on our project and track changes as we go through.

So, just run the git init command to initialize our repository.

After that, go ahead and add our initial commit, which should just be our GoMod.

Once that's done, open up your project in your editor, and let's start our first file.

Let's call this main.go to specify this is where the main function will live.

The first line you want to add is the package name, in this case it's the main package.

Every file in Go belongs to a package, which is how imports are organised.

In this case we're specifying that the main.go file lives in the main package, which tells the compiler that our code is a program and so it builds an executable.

Next we need to add our main function.

Every Go program has a main function, which acts as the main entry point to our code.

As is customary, let's start off by printing hello world inside of our main function.

To do this we first need to import another package, called fmt, or format.

Some others might call it phmt, but I disagree.

To do this we need to call the import format command just underneath our main package.

If you have a modern editor configured properly, imports should be automatically imported for you, but it's worthwhile us doing this manually just to see how this works.

Next head back to the main function and type in format.println .

You'll notice that this function is camelCase but the first letter is a capital.

Go uses this for encapsulation to specify that the function is public.

Now our program is complete.

Let's jump over to a terminal window and actually run this code.

We can do so by using go, run, and to the name of our file path.

In this case, main.go.

After a short period of time, you should see Hello World print to the console.

Perfect.

We've just created our first Go program.

Congratulations.

We can also build our code by using the go build command, converting it into a binary.

Go is pretty awesome and you can build binaries for other architectures if you like.

However, that's beyond the scope of this video.

Now that we have the basics down, let's turn it up and actually build a simple web server, which we'll use as the starting point for our API.

Go comes with a rich standard library and provides all we need to get a basic web server running, which we can extend later on.

To start, first add the net slash HTTP package to our imports.

This package provides functionality for creating both HTTP clients and servers, which is what we want.

Now we can instantiate an HTTP server using the following line in our main function.

This creates a basic go type of HTTP server and stores it in a variable called server.

You'll notice we're using an ampersand, which means we're storing this as a pointer and taking the memory address, rather than the value.

this type we can then define some of the properties of our server.

The first is the server's address, which will bind to port 3000 using the given string.

Next we'll need to specify a handler for our server.

This is an interface that will be called when our server receives a request.

Let's use the http handler function call and specify a function named basic handler, which we're going to create now.

To do so let's define a new function using the func keyword.

We'll call this basic handler as we suggested and specify the following parameters, which is what we need for our function to be able to conform to their HTTP handler interface.

The first parameter is called w and is a HTTP response writer.

This is an interface type that enables us to write what will eventually be our HTTP response.

The second type is called r and is a pointer of type HTTP request.

We can tell this is a pointer by the use of the asterisks.

This type represents the inbound HTTP request the server receives from the client.

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Inside of the function let's go ahead and write a body response of hello world.

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We can do this by calling the write method of the response writer.

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This function expects a byte array so we'll need to cast our string to be one, which is done by using the syntax on screen.

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All that remains is to actually run our server.

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We can do this by calling the listen and serve method on our server type.

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This method returns an error and it's good practice in Go to handle them.

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This is done by using an if error check, which will check if the error exists, i.e. it's not nil.

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Inside of the block we can then handle the error, which in our case we're just going to log it to stdout using the format.println method.

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Okay, now we're able to go ahead and test out this code.

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Let's jump over to a new terminal window.

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We can run our app using the go run command we saw earlier.

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Once that's done we can open up another terminal window and run a curl command to our localhost at port 3000.

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This will send an HTTP GET request to our server.

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And we can see we get a response of hello world which shows us our server is working as expected.

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Very nice.

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To stop the the server, head over to the window where we're running it and press Ctrl and C.

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Now that we have our basic web server up, it's time to add some additional functionality to it.

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The first thing we're going to want to do is handle HTTP routing.

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You may have noticed but we currently only have a single handler in our project, which will handle all of the inbound requests.

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We could do some basic routing inside of this handler, but that can be incredibly tedious to do so, and it's a challenge to properly handle things such as path parameters.

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So whilst Go does have a robust standard library, it's worthwhile for us to use a third-party dependency at this point.

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But which one?

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Well, my go-to router used to be GorillaMux, which offered a great deal of functionality for very little abstraction,

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whilst remaining true to the HTTP handler interface of the standard library.

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However, as of the end of 2022, GorillaMux has been archived as read-only, So for future proofing our API, it's probably not the best choice.

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There's plenty of other options out there however, but for this video I'm going to go with Qi.

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This router is very similar to GorillaMarks and also conforms to the http interface of the standard library, so it works as a suitable replacement in my opinion.

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To use Qi we first need to add it to our code.

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There's a couple of ways to do this and they all involve using GoMod.

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Before I show you these approaches, now is a good time to commit our code so we can easily roll back any changes.

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If we run git status we can see that our API binary currently appears in the untracked files.

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That's not ideal.

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When using git it's a bad practice to commit any build

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artifacts as they can add junk to a git repo pretty quickly.

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To solve this we need to add a .gitignore.

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Let's go ahead and create one.

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Inside we can then specify the name of any file or folders we want git to, well, ignore.

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Let's add the name of our binary, which is API.

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Okay great, now if we run git status again we should see that the API is no longer available to be tracked.

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Also because we're on macOS it's probably worthwhile to also add the .ds store files to our git ignore as well.

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These files are created whenever you navigate to a directory using finder.

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Rather than opening up our .git ignore file again, we can actually run the following command, which will concatenate a string into our .gitignore file.

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Once that's done, go ahead and run the git add command to add all of the files in our directory, and then run the git commit command to store them.

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Now we can demonstrate the two approaches for adding a dependency to our project.

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The first approach is to use the go get command, which will download and add an entry to the go mod of our current go project, provided we're in one.

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Let's try this by adding chi to our project.

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To do so, type in the following command.

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You'll notice that we're specifying the git repo of qi.

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Remember, GoMod is decentralized, and so it uses the git repo URL as the package identifier.

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Now if we take a look at our go.mod, we can see that an entry has been added.

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So this is the first approach.

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However, the second approach tends to be the one I use more often.

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Let's reset our changes to show how we would use this use this.

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For this approach, we just import the package into our code like we would any other.

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Then when we want to add it to our GoMod, we just call GoMod tidy in our terminal.

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This will tell Go to search for any packages within our project and add them to the Go.mod.

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As you can see, Qi has now been added.

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Also, you may have noticed that a Go.sum file now exists as well.

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This is used to ensure consistency across package versions in case they are updated upstream.

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It's a good idea to check in both the GoMod and the Go.sum files into our our Git repo, so we'll do this now.

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Okay, with Qi added to our project and our code committed, let's actually use it with our HTTP server.

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Heading back to our main function, we need to first initialise a new instance of the Qi router for use with our server.

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We can do this by calling Qi.newRouter and assigning it to a variable called router.

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In Go, any method prefix with the word new is conventionally a constructor.

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Oftentimes it's preferable to use the constructor method instead of directly instantiating an instance, as they will often initialise private properties of the type.

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With our new router created, let's go ahead and add a root for get slash hello, and we'll match it to the basic handler that we've already got defined.

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We can do this by calling the router.get method and passing in our path as the first parameter.

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The second parameter requires an http.handler function, which we can just set to our basic handler.

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The last thing we need to do is add our router to the server handler.

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What's really nice about Qi is that the router type itself conforms to the HTTP handler interface, so all we have to do here is replace our handler with our router instead.

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With that done, we can go ahead and test our behaviour.

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To do so, let's rerun our app using gorun on our main.go file.

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Heading over to another terminal window, we can then run our curl command against our localhost at port 3000.

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However this time you'll notice we get a 404 page not found response.

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That's because we haven't set any handlers for the slash root, and she is automatically handling that for us, which is pretty neat.

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Let's run curl again, but this time point it to our slash hello path.

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This time we get back the expected hello world response.

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There's one last thing for us to test.

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Let's try this with a POST request instead of a GET request.

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We can do this with curl using the X flag, which allows us to specify the HTTP method.

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Make sure you set X to uppercase.

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We'll also add the lowercase v flag so that we're able to see the full HTTP headers.

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Here you can see we're getting an HTTP status response of 405, which stands for Method Not Allowed.

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This is because we only specified a route for the method of GET in our path, and therefore Qi provides this error for us.

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With a basic router added, it's clear we're missing something.

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And that something is logging.

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Qi fortunately provides us a logging middleware that we're able to use right out of the box.

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We can add this to our router by first importing the middleware package from the Qi plugin by using the following line.

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With our middleware imported we can then add it to the router via the use method.

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Now if we restart our server, we should start to see logs appear whenever we handle a request and response.

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Nice.

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Now that we're in a good spot, it's time to commit our code again.

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To do so, go ahead and run the git add command to stage our changes, and then type in the git commit command to go ahead and commit them.

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By the way, the M flag stands for message, in case you hadn't guessed that already.

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This allows us to specify the message we want to store along with our actual commit.

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By the way, if you want to watch this entire course now without YouTube adverts, you can do.

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It's all up on the NetNinja website, netninja.dev.

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You can buy the course for $2 to get instant access to all of it, or you can sign up to NetNinja Pro and get instant access to all of my courses without adverts,

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as well as premium courses not found on YouTube including my Udemy ones that's nine dollars a month

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and you can get your first month half price

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when you use this promo code right here

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so I'm going to leave this link down below in the video description for you to sign up

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and I really hope you enjoy this series

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and please do not forget to share subscribe and like the videos

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that really helps a lot and I'm going to see you in the very next lesson

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338 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Build a Microservice with Go - Getting Started”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: add, server, http, git, command. This video has 204 sentences and 3192 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:16. The speaker talks fast, about 196 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
handler noun	/ˈhænd.lə/	One who handles something (especially manually) or someone.
specify verb	/ˈspɛs.əˌfaɪ/	To state explicitly, or in detail, or as a condition.
router noun	/ˈɹaʊ.tɚ/	Someone who routes or directs items from one location to another.
repossession noun		The condition of being repossessed.
initialize verb	/ɪˈnɪʃəlaɪz/	To assign initial values to something.
parameter noun	/pəˈɹæm.ə.tɚ/	A value kept constant during an experiment, equation, calculation, or similar, but varied over other versions of the experiment, equation, calculation, etc.
microservice noun		A small independent process that communicates with other processes, used to break down a complex task into many simpler components.
curl noun	/kɜɹl/	A curving piece or lock of hair; a ringlet.
directory noun	/dɪˈɹɛktəɹi/	A list of names, addresses etc, of specific classes of people or organizations, often in alphabetical order or in some classification.
binary adjective	/ˈbaɪ.nə.ɹi/	Being in one of two mutually exclusive states.
middleware noun		Software that functions at an intermediate layer between applications and operating system or database management system, or between client and server.
dependency noun	/dɪˈpɛndənsi/	A state of dependence; a refusal to exercise initiative.
conform verb	/kənˈfɔɹm/	To adapt to something by more closely matching it, especially something normative.
pointer noun	/ˈpɔɪn.təɹ/	One who points.
functionality noun		The ability to do a task, performance, or execution; a set of functions that something is able or equipped to perform.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
go ahead verb	/ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/	To proceed with; to begin.
open up verb		To open.
set up verb	/ˌsɛt ˈʌp/	To make ready for use.
check out verb		To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
get back verb		Return to where one came from.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
roll back verb		To return to a prior state.
sign up verb		To add a name to the list of people who are participating in something.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Here I'm specifying my github repository.
Let's jump over to a new terminal window.
Let's go ahead and create one.
Let's try this by adding chi to our project.
There's one last thing for us to test.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is installed · is specified · are organised
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	package, which is · servers, which is · ampersand, which means
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've brought · haven't noticed · We've just created

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 56 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, we'll, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: worthwhile /ˌwɜː(ɹ)θˈwaɪl/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: initialize /ɪˈnɪʃəlaɪz/, instantiate /ɪnˈstænʃieɪt/, abstraction /æbˈstɹæk.ʃn̩/, conventionally /kənˈvɛnʃənəli/
Long words — get the stress right: initialize /ɪˈnɪʃəlaɪz/, parameter /pəˈɹæm.ə.tɚ/, directory /dɪˈɹɛktəɹi/, dependency /dɪˈpɛndənsi/, decentralize /diːˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like handler, specify, router.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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