From Zero to Millions: Building Scalable Systems in Go the FOSS Way

Scaling a backend system to handle millions of requests per minute sounds exciting—but it’s also brutally real. In this talk, I’ll share hard-earned lessons from building and scaling high-performance services using Go, and why we chose to create GoFr, a minimal yet powerful Golang framework tailored for modern distributed systems.

We’ll explore patterns around service modularity, auth implementation, middleware design, observability, and testing—as well as the key bottlenecks we hit at scale. You'll see how FOSS principles influenced not just the code, but the mindset of building tools that are developer-friendly, maintainable, and battle-tested.

This talk is both a story and a blueprint for anyone building Go systems—from open-source enthusiasts to production backend engineers.

• Real-world architecture and performance lessons from production Go systems

• Why we built GoFr instead of using existing frameworks—and what sets it apart

• Practical patterns for building scalable, testable, and maintainable Go services

• The role of open-source principles in framework design and team adoption

• How to think like a systems engineer when building tools for the community