I accidentally discovered malicious programs in the Go ecosystem that impersonate legitimate tools such as the linter ldez/usetesting, the HCL editor go.mercari.io/hcledit, the official MailerSend Go SDK mailersend/mailersend-go, and many more. These programs are not very popular but are still used by some developers. By the time I wrote this article, I had reported the malicious repositories to GitHub support, and most of them have been deleted.

In this blog post, I will show that contributing to Go language repositories is as simple as contributing to any other open-source repo. This will be a step-by-step guide on how to contribute to Go language repositories. For the example, I will use the main Go repo go.googlesource.com/go.

If you are using an Apple Silicon M1 chip, then you may encounter an issue when downloading Go versions 1.15 or earlier via dl.

Here are the solution:

$ GOARCH=amd64; go run golang.org/dl/go1.15@latest download
$ go install golang.org/dl/go1.15@latest
$ go1.15 version
go version go1.15 darwin/amd64

I work simultaneously on different companies’ projects, open-source projects, and personal projects. I should therefore use the same username but distinct email addresses for each of them. Although we can set a git config user.email <email@example.com> for each project repository, this might be a tedious manual task and perhaps unsuitable.

The Git config manual describes the use of configuration files to better manage such a task through “Conditional includes”.

Situation

On an interview people judge developers by their GitHub. Recently, I saw the tweet with picture showing GitHub contribution with one commit activity and the caption:

“Please don’t apply for a Senior dev position if your GitHub looks like this…”

NIC.UA is a Ukrainian domain registrar which provides “.pp.ua” for free. This domain is often used by individuals or small organizations who are looking for a web presence but don’t want to pay for a custom domain name.

Like in typical repo this blog has first git commit:

$ git commit --allow-empty --message "Initial commit"