Code for the Huggable.Us web app
Huggable.Us is a web app that lets a couple send virtual hugs to each other. It is a personal project I embarked on in order to learn go and stay connected in a long distance relationship.
The first and foremost purpose was to learn go, so I did everything from scratch without any frameworks. This significantly increased the time to the MVP, but did mean that I learned many fundamentals of full-stack development like HTTP, x509/TLS, REST APIs, Service Workers, async/await, and systemd.
At the time of embarking on this project back in the summer of 2019, I didn't have the stamina to handle the persistence layer of the app (postgres DB to store VAPID keys for example), as well as work for a return offer at my internship and pursue job applications all at the same time. Progress somewhat faltered as a result, and since then I've been busy at my current job and have moved on to bigger and better projects. Furthermore, while I have great respect for Go as a programming language, I've become really inspired by Rust and I want to spend my free time contributing to that community and growing my skills in that language. For this reason, if this project gets revived, it will probably be as a Rust reimplementation (RIIR 😛), this time taking advantage of some backend frameworks and possibly WASM to handle the client-side code as well. I expect to keep Go as my second favorite language for now though, and we will see what the future holds. Perhaps when Go gets generics, I'll take another look at things :)