Hi Kanak, Thanks for giving us more detail. This is a fascinating and incredibly useful problem space (networking and storage). It is well worth diving into; sub-spaces in it become people's whole careers.
As you've observed, a finished product like MinIO will use alot of technology. The thing to do is to take a divide and conquer approach, and to just focus on one part at a time. Recursively split that part into its components until you have something you can tackle in a reasonable time span -- whatever that is for your available time. And don't feel rushed. Computers run so fast that they hide a very large amount of complexity--and can deceive us into thinking that these things "must be simple". These are complex topics that will take quite some time to comprehend--especially if you have to come up to speed with the math behind them--and even quite a bit of time if you ignore the math, which is sometimes viable. Understanding the TLS handshake, for example, from scratch, probably took me a good 3-6 months. One trick is to choose a problem to focus on. By taking a problem focus, you can turn learning into a fun game. Pick a problem that you don't understand the answer to (yet), but that you know *has* an answer, because others have solved it. By dividing and conquering, and focusing on specific problems, you avoid being overwhelmed by too much at once. Then the thing that I find most help in learning a technology is to take a hands on approach, and to try and "solve the problem myself" first, or at least some small version of the problem in the space that I want to understand. That is, actually write code to solve, or try to solve, the problem. By trying to tackle a small, focused problem yourself, without "looking at the answers" first, you come to an intuitive understanding of the problem, and thus the design space solutions must take. You'll either find an easy solution nobody else thought of, or you'll run into a dead end and then truly appreciate the cleverness of the solution when you do "turn to the back of the book" to check your answer. Because that's the next step--once you have come to grips with the problem space, then you can look at the answers that other people have done. But still keep "hands-on" as you do so. Take the clever ideas that you encounter in looking at "the answers", and incorporate them into your own solution code. To give a specific example for networking, the area you are trying to tackle, I found it most helpful to come to grips with TCP by implementing the sliding window protocol that TCP uses for reliable stream transmission. The problem is stated thusly: how can I turn an unreliable, packet based communication system into a reliable, infinite stream of bytes between two hosts? I would minimize this at first to focus on the essentials: how can you reliably get a 1000 byte blob from one goroutine to another goroutine, when you must send it in parts through a go channel of type "chan [10]byte", *and* you are forced to discard 20% of your receives at random on the receiving end to simulate a lossy wifi network. Good luck! Enjoy the learning process. Best wishes, Jason On Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 12:36:55 PM UTC Kanak Bhatia wrote: Thanks for your response! I wanted to clarify my focus. I recently started exploring MinIO, an object storage system written in Go, and realized that I need a better understanding of networking protocols like TCP and UDP in the context of storage systems. MinIO uses S3-compatible APIs, encryption, and distributed architecture, which got me thinking about how such systems handle networking and security. I’d like to understand: 1. Networking in Object Storage – How TCP/UDP, HTTP APIs, and data transfer mechanisms work in systems like MinIO. 2. File to Object Conversion – How files are stored as objects and retrieved efficiently. 3. Encryption & Security – How data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. 4. Backup & Storage Concepts – Key networking and storage fundamentals relevant to cloud storage. 5. How authentication, load balancing, and distributed networking are handled in Go. Could you recommend structured resources or approaches to learning these topics? I have around 2 years experience in the Java Springboot Domain, work mostly concerned around web development making APIs. My main issue is that I'm looking at an open-source project in Go and trying to understand its flow, along with the different networking terminologies used in it. Specifically, while going through MinIO's code, I’ve come across terms like gRPC streaming, HTTP multipart uploads, connection pooling, TLS handshakes, and distributed erasure coding. Understanding how these pieces fit together, especially in the context of high-performance storage systems, is where I’m struggling. On Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 12:16:59 AM UTC+5:30 Jason E. Aten wrote: Hi Kanak. You'll get better answers with a little bit longer description of what specifically you want to learn. Just "networking" is too broad a topic to offer any concise guidance--its like saying "I want to know about 'life', or 'the earth', or 'the internet'". What problems do you face? What things about networking to you find challenging, opaque, bewildering? What do you know already/what is your background so far? Best wishes, Jason On Monday, March 10, 2025 at 5:48:10 PM UTC Kanak Bhatia wrote: I want to learn networking in Go. What are the best resources to refer to and projects to practice? Would love some guidance. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/e717f3f2-f9bd-49d8-920a-40f149e26d50n%40googlegroups.com.
