Advanced networking

You’ve familiarized yourself with TCP sockets, conquered HTTP servers, and even wrapped your head around TLS. You might think that’s all there is to network programming in Go. How adorably naive. Now, prepare for a wild ride into the realm of UDP, WebSocket, and various techniques that will make you question your life choices.

Think of network programming as an unfinished game with perpetually changing rules. Just when you think you’ve grasped the basics, the developers throw in a new gameplay mechanic (such as real-time communication protocols), introduce unpredictable bugs (network latency), and crank up the difficulty level (scalability issues). Oh, and don’t forget the delightful online community, where opinions on the “best” way to do things are as numerous and conflicting as JavaScript frameworks.

Let’s start with the basics. UDP is the wild west of network protocols. It’s fast, unrelenting, and...