Igor writes to the internet

From LLM review to the wrong protocol: how I tested a Go driver for Informix

Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Pic. 1. A working test connection hid the protocol mismatch that blocked production use.

At work, I needed to rewrite a piece of legacy code from Perl to Go. The code itself was well established, and there were no real problems with it. The problem was a dependency: the main database was still Informix.

Let us skip my explanation of why it had to be Informix. “Historical reasons,” as one of my old team leads used to say.

Informix is a database with a long history. It was once a major player, but today it is a fairly niche technology. It is still developed and used in production, but finding a modern Go library for it is much harder than for PostgreSQL or MySQL.

A year earlier, I had already looked for a suitable adapter. I found IfxGo [1] , an old fork made specifically for Informix, and its base project, the general-purpose ODBC driver [2] . I could not get them to work properly back then, so I had to put the refactoring idea aside.

This time I found go_ibm_db [3] . At first glance, it looked like a ready-made solution: the project had been alive since 2018, the repository had about 280 commits, it had a Bun [4] integration, and it had more than a hundred stars on GitHub. That was no guarantee of quality, of course, but it still looked better than an abandoned fork with no releases.

I started Informix in a container, installed IBM CLI Driver, connected to it, and read some data. Everything worked on the first try.

I was delighted. The refactoring I had postponed for about a year suddenly stopped looking like a problem. All I had to do was add the library and write the code.

Go 1.21 vs 1.26 on gorush: Green Tea lost this round

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:45:00 +0300

We recently brought a long-lived internal fork of appleboy/gorush [1] back up to date and moved its build from roughly Go 1.21.1 to Go 1.26. The upgrade was necessary. It was also a good excuse to test a claim that often slips into migration reports without evidence: “the new Go runtime made it faster.”

It did not-not with the default collector in the local hot paths I measured.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am a Senior Go Developer focused on payments, distributed systems, integrations, and backend infrastructure. I prefer explicit architecture, observable services, and boring technology that is easy to operate.

Experience

Confidential - Senior Go Developer

2025 - Present · Remote

Stack: Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Thales TPC SDK, Mastercard MDES, OpenAPI

Developed issuer-side card tokenization for Apple Pay and Google Pay: push/manual provisioning, token lifecycle, and webhooks.
Integrated Thales TPC SDK and Mastercard MDES APIs, including activation paths and PIN management.
Built idempotent gRPC/REST gateways with end-to-end correlation across bank, processor, TSP, and MDES systems.
Investigated cross-system incidents involving network traces, cryptographic errors, and observability gaps while keeping PCI DSS scope minimal.

Sendsay (Internet Projects) - Senior Go Developer

2023 - 2025 · Remote