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ELIZABETH ATIENO
ELIZABETH ATIENO

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What I Learnt From My First Go Project: Go Reloaded

When I first started learning Go, I thought I understood the language.
I knew the syntax, I knew the logic, and I thought writing small programs would be easy.
Then I started Go Reloaded.

What Go Reloaded Was
Go Reloaded was my first “real” project in Go — not just following tutorials, but actually building something and making it work.
It was simple on the surface: output formatting, string handling, and writing a few functions.
But simple turned out to be deceptively hard.

The Moment I Got Humbled
I thought my code was perfect… until I ran the tests.
The output I got was:

it was the best of Times , it was the worst of TIMES,
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whereas the expected output was:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of TIMES,
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One tiny comma. One small space. And the test failed.

It was frustrating, but it taught me something crucial: precision matters. Computers don’t guess what you meant — they only care what you actually wrote.

What I Learned
From Go Reloaded, I learned:
-Small mistakes, like punctuation or spaces, can break everything.
-Writing code carefully matters more than writing it fast.
-Debugging is as much about reading the test as reading the code.
-It was humbling, yes, but also exciting. Each mistake became a lesson.

This project set the tone for all my future Go work. After Go Reloaded:
-I started reading test failures carefully.
-I paid more attention to formatting and data handling
-I became more patient and methodical

Go Reloaded was more than just code — it was my first taste of learning in public.

Final Thought
Sometimes the smallest projects teach the biggest lessons.
Go Reloaded taught me to slow down, pay attention, and embrace the little mistakes because that’s where growth happens.

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