Master real-world concurrency patterns — pipelines worker pools rate limiting and more

Welcome to Go Concurrency Patterns

Concurrency is what makes Go special. Goroutines and channels are built into the language, not bolted on as a library. But knowing the primitives isn't enough — you need patterns.

This course picks up where Go Essentials left off. We assume you know goroutines, channels, select, WaitGroup, and Mutex. If those sound unfamiliar, take the Go Essentials course first.

Here, you go deeper. Real-world patterns that production Go code uses every day. The stuff that separates "I know goroutines" from "I can build concurrent systems."

A word of caution

This course teaches powerful patterns — but knowing them doesn't mean you should use them everywhere. Go's philosophy is minimal and simple. A plain for loop is often better than a pipeline. A mutex might be clearer than a channel. Reach for these patterns when the problem genuinely calls for concurrency, not just because you can.

What You'll Learn

Concurrency Refresher: quick recap of goroutines, channels, select, sync primitives
Context Deep Dive: cancellation, timeouts, deadlines, value propagation
Pipeline Pattern: stage-by-stage data processing with channels
Fan-Out / Fan-In: distribute work across goroutines, collect results
Worker Pools: fixed-size pools with job queues and graceful shutdown
Rate Limiting & Throttling: control throughput with tickers and token buckets
Semaphore & Bounded Concurrency: limit parallel work without a full worker pool
Error Handling in Concurrent Code: errgroup, error channels, collecting errors
sync & atomic Primitives: Once, Pool, RWMutex, Map, atomic operations
Deadlocks & Race Conditions: detection, debugging, common pitfalls
Classic Problems: Dining Philosophers, Producer-Consumer
Build a Concurrent Web Scraper: capstone project combining everything

Prerequisites

Complete the Go Essentials course or have equivalent knowledge: goroutines, channels, select, WaitGroup, Mutex.

Course Structure

Twelve lessons. Each builds on the previous one, ending with a capstone project that ties all the patterns together into a real, working tool. Quizzes after every lesson to make sure it sticks.

Let's go.

Resources

Go Concurrency Patterns — Sameer Ajmani's deep dive on pipelines, cancellation, and fan-out/fan-in
Concurrency Is Not Parallelism — Andrew Gerrand's foundational talk on Go's concurrency model