A Migration Tale from the Heart of Nigeria’s Telco Tech Scene
Once upon a deployment cycle, deep in the codebase of a Nigerian tech company, lived a mighty Laravel application. This wasn’t just any app—it was a Value Added Services (VAS) Aggregator powering services across all four major telcos in Nigeria, handling subscriptions, renewals, sync jobs, and API comms with partners. At peak, this beast processed over 10 million requests per day.
It was stable. Trusted. Battle-tested.
I should know—I built it.
Four years ago, I architected the Laravel version, led the team that brought it to life, and had been nursing it ever since. Life was good… until something interesting happened:
👀 “I See Go on Your CV…”
Yes. That one line changed everything.
Out of pure curiosity and hunger to expand my skill set, I had recently learned Golang and casually added it to my CV. My boss noticed. And the next thing I heard was:
“How about you migrate the Laravel app to Golang?”
Was I ready? Emotionally? Mentally? I didn’t know. But one thing I did know: I was excited. This was going to be my greatest vibe coding moment yet.
And I wasn’t doing it alone—I had my AI coding buddy, ChatGPT, by my side.
🛠️ The Vibe Migration
We got to work.
Before you could say goroutine, the entire Laravel app was reborn in Go:
✅ Subscriptions and Renewals
✅ Telco Sync Jobs
✅ Partner API Integrations
All rewritten, optimized, and tested in glorious Golang.
(I’ll write another piece someday to break down the migration architecture, package choices, and philosophy—but today’s story is about what happened after the deployment.)
🚀 Post-Migration Wins
Latency dropped significantly.
The app felt faster. Snappier.
One of our VAT partners casually told my boss:
“Your system’s faster these days…”
My boss, ever the minimalist, passed it on:
“They say you did well.”
Me, pretending not to care:
“Oh, nice. That could’ve been an email so I can tag it and ask for a raise.”
Instead, I went with:
“Boss, I think I’ll finally take that one-week leave I’ve been postponing.”
He smiled. “You’ve earned it.”
🌴 Bahamas? More like Balconies
I started dreaming of the Bahamas.
Cocktails. Sand. Peace.
I was already mentally packing my bags for the Bahamas when my bank account whispered:
“My guy, you get mind.”
After a long and emotionally-charged debate with my wallet, I settled for a 'staycation': some Netflix, and plantain chips. It wasn’t tropical, but hey, it was chill.
📟 Day 5: The Beep Heard Round the World
Five days into my break, my work phone beeped.
I knew that sound. It was our monitoring system. And when that tone hits? Something’s on fire.
Next came the call—from my boss, obviously.
“The app is misbehaving.”
🕵️ Enter: Detective Dev (a.k.a. Me)
Time to activate my inner Sherlock.
I dusted off my laptop, summoned ChatGPT again, and dove headfirst into debugging mode.
Here’s what I discovered:
🚨 The Issue: 502 Bad Gateway from Nginx
When traffic spiked, our Golang app would fail silently. Nginx would scream back with 502 Bad Gateway.
Oddly enough, this never happened with the Laravel version.
🔍 Root Cause Analysis
After hours of profiling, deep dives, and terminal whispers, the cause became clear:
- r.Run() from Gin package was being used. Simple, but no timeout control.
- No http.Server timeouts meant requests could hang forever.
- Connection pool exhaustion was real—our DB connections were tapped out.
- Nginx couldn’t reach the Go app anymore under load. Classic resource mismanagement.
- The app had been running continuously for 5 days—Go wasn’t crashing, but it wasn’t thriving either.
🛠️ The Fixes That Saved My Leave
✅ 1. Custom http.Server with Timeouts
Replaced r.Run() with a properly configured server. I set:
- ReadTimeout
- WriteTimeout
- IdleTimeout
And just like that, no more hanging requests.
✅ 2. DB Connection Pool Tuning
Grabbed a real DB handle using DB.DB() and configured:
- SetMaxOpenConns
- SetMaxIdleConns
- SetConnMaxLifetime
Our DB stopped screaming. The app stabilized.
✅ 3. Added pprof for Real-Time Monitoring
I enabled net/http/pprof on a separate port. With it, I tracked:
- Goroutines
- Memory allocation
- CPU spikes
Insightful. Powerful. A lifesaver.
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