Write Professional Command-line Programs in Go

Gigi Sayfan

I'm the DevOps team manager at Helix - a bioinformatics and genomics start-up, author of several books on Kubernetes and Go as well as hundreds of technical articles. I program professionally for 20+ years and still amazed when anything actually works.

I'm a long time software developer. I started programming in the early 80s (yes, the previous millennium) on the Dragon 32 and I never grew out of it. I was born and raised in Israel, served in the IDF (Israeli Defense forces) for three and a half years in the paratroopers and special forces. I even got shot in the leg during my military service, but don't worry I healed completely and even ran a half marathon a few months later. I studied computer science at Tel-Aviv university and got an MBA too. I started developing software professionally in 1995 and I'm still at it. I'm currently a principal software architect at Helix (http://www.helix.com) - Where we build a consumer genomics and bioinformatics platform. I've had a very diverse career, mostly working for startup companies where I wore multiple hats, often at the same time. I always follow my passion and try to work in a new interesting domain. Here are some of the domains and industries I contributed to: - instant messaging (when it just started) - morphing - chip fabrication process control - embedded multimedia applications for game consoles (Sony PlayStation) - brain-inspired machine learning (Numenta) - custom browser development (Rockmelt) - web services for 3D distributed game platforms (Roblox), - IoT sensors (Aclima) - virtual reality (stealth startup) In addition to working in very different domains I also traveled across the tech stack from Windows desktop applications, through cross-platform engine to cloud-based distributed systems, and databases. Here some of the programming languages I used professionally: - Go, - Python, - C, - C++, - C#, - Java, - Delphi, - JavaScript - Cobol - PowerBuilder I also programmed against many operating systems (often at a very low-level): - Windows (3.11 through 7) - Linux (so many distros) - macOS - Lynx (embedded) - Sony Playstation These days it's all about cloud-native computing with Docker and Kubernetes. I've deployed production systems on AWS, GCE, Azure and even Alibaba cloud. Outside of work, I have a lovely wife and 3 kids. We love traveling, hiking, sports (weight lifting, Crossfit, martial arts) and board games (Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Seven Wonders, Puerto Rico). I used to play a lot of basketball and do Crossfit. These days my athletic outlet is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I also spend a lot of time learning and sharing what I've learned with the world through open source (http://github.com/the-gigi), articles and books.