Stepping out of Front-End with Go

I've spent these last 4 years working as a front-end/mobile developer, mostly programming in JavaScript under the React ecosystem; before that, I worked with Angular/Ionic. And throughout all that time, I only saw myself as a Mobile developer with expertise in React Native, leaving to the side my real vocation, Software Engineer, and that led to not trying to learn new technologies.

During my latest years of university, a lot of projects won't have a specific technology or language. In that moment the innovation factor and my position on just wanting to be a front-end developer drove me into not trying to jump outside the React bubble. Adding to this, when I started looking into starting my professional career, the most recommended library for grabbing a front-end job was again, React.

Front-End

Being Front-End focused is not something bad for your knowledge or your career, with a right mindset it can be the opposite. That is why I think my personal experience is not the norm. I mostly do this to tell my story from my point of view, and do some introspection. But, I still think I'm not alone in this one and maybe someone can relate to what I experienced.

For the majority of my developer experience I only coded what was needed from me at work, maybe looking into something that grabbed my attention, but always with the mindset that I wouldn't develop or do research outside working hours. During this time period I lost my essence of wanting to develop something of my personal interest and learn from it.

The point I'm trying to make is that what made me want to be a Software Engineer that is always learning and always up to date was lost and with that MY CURIOSITY was gone with it. And the consequence of that is feeling burnout, not pushing yourself to being better everyday at what you love and creating personal projects left to right and not finishing any of them.

2025, Go and my change of perspective

In 2025 I received my bachelor’s degree in System Engineering, and that kind of reminded me of what I like to do, mess with computers so I reinstalled Linux on my personal laptop (as one normally does), switched my personal text editor from VScode to Neovim and just have fun configuring my Linux machine. But something else came up in 2025.

Go

Go was that language that reignited my curiosity, I first heard about it from a content creator named ThePrimeagen, in his videos he always praised that little blue gopher, so I decided to research it. I was drawn into the language because of the simplistic approach, the type system and how simple it really is to read. One other thing was that it reminded me of C, and I really loved programming in C at University, when I had that curiosity at my peak.

At this point, I had programmed in TS/JS for 4 years straight and that is not counting the 3 years prior at university when I just wanted to do React. And that has some impact on the way that you think about programming in general and algorithms, where my work was mostly

Generate/Edit a UI component -> Add TS/JS logic to it.

The UI and UX is the protagonist here. What I'm trying to say is that this stack of technologies really abstracts some things out of the programming experience, the first one I realized was pointers, you really don't see pointers when you are working with React/RN.

Another difference that really stood out to me was the difference in mentality, in React/React Native the norm is to import as many dependencies as you need (and we all know the consequences of that), if you look at a decent sized app you will find that the package.json has a lot of dependencies. In Go you have the opposite, it gives you a very rich and extensive standard library. You only really import what is really needed, a DB Driver maybe, a session manager, but you are always encouraged to not just import dependencies for the sake of it, if the standard library gives you that functionality use it, if not, try to build it before importing.

My learning with Go

Go really got into me, I started to read technical books again, that one being "Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming" made by Jon Bodner that I really recommend for newcomers to the language. And that was just the starting point I really started to read more and more about Go, the next thing that caught my attention was the concurrency model so naturally I read "Concurrency in Go: Tools and Techniques for Developers" by Katherine Cox-Buday, then I got interested in interpreters and how they work so I read "Writing An Interpreter In Go" by Thorsten Ball.

Those were some books that I have read and can recommend. Another resource that I still hear every week for being up to date with Go is the podcast "Cup o' Go". The list just goes on, you can take a look at my About Page.

Besides the resources that I read or listened to, I made personal projects that I can say (now with pride) that I finished. That's just the beginning since I started learning Go 6-7 months ago.

Future with Go

My objective for 2026 is to keep reading about Go and now look into Architecture / System Design, deploy a simplistic blog web page in Go / HTMX to challenge myself to not work with JS, and in mid-late 2026 contribute to open source and maybe move from a mobile/front focused job into a more Full-stack role where I can expand myself more and more and just be a better Software Engineer as a whole. After that who knows? Maybe going more into low level languages, keep learning about interpreters/compilers...

Conclusion

I want to finish this article with the following sentence: "Try something new, you never know how well it will impact your learning". For me it was Go but I for sure want to keep reading and learning new things. For you it might be learning about data engineering, going to low-level languages, going the opposite way into a front-end framework, learning about self-hosting.