Customer Stories

Customer Stories: Spark by Readdle

Hello everyone, 

As part of our continued celebration of GoLand’s fifth anniversary, we’d like to talk about the most meaningful part of our job – you! Today is a day for customer stories!

Before we start, we want to let you know that we’ve hidden a small gift designed especially for you inside GoLand! All you need to do is type “Happy B-day, GoLand!” in GoLand 2022.3, GoLand 2022.3.1, or GoLand 2022.2.5 and see what happens. Just a small spoiler – don’t be afraid to share your score on social media, and don’t forget to use the #WonderGoLand hashtag to compete with others.

Now to the story! Meet Alexander Telpis, a software engineer with over 12 years of experience, mostly focused on backend development. Currently Alexander is a Server Developer at Readdle, which creates productivity-enhancing applications such as Scanner Pro, PDF Expert, Documents, Calendars, and Spark to help people around the world automate their routines and save time. In the beginning of 2022, Readdle reached the milestone of 200 million worldwide app downloads. 

Alexander currently works on Spark, a cross-platform email application designed to filter out noise to let you focus on what’s important. Spark has millions of users worldwide and a team of 40 engineers who work hard to help you love your email again. 

Spark’s backend is mostly written in Go. Alexander said that this was a natural language choice for them based on the positive experience they previously had with it. Some of the app’s first iteration components were written in Node.js and PHP, but the team quickly migrated to Go.

“We knew that it would fit our requirements in terms of reliability, performance, and variety of libraries. Go allowed us to use a wide range of tools to increase our data protection level, which is crucial for a mail client. We also had a decent amount of experience with it from previous projects, so that really helped with Spark’s early stage development.”

Before joining Readdle, Alexander started out by using Go for small projects in code editors. But when the projects started to get bigger, he decided to try IntelliJ IDEA with the Go plugin. At the time, GoLand did not yet exist as a separate product. However, everything changed with GoLand’s first release: 

“I believe it was one of first releases when I heard about GoLand and just installed it and started using it. I didn’t really check for alternatives because whenever I find some product that is specific to a particular language or platform, I prefer using it. And back then GoLand was one of the very few IDEs specifically focused on Go. So I just set it up and have continued to use it to this day.”

Navigation, git-client, linters, and refactorings are Alexander’s most frequently used features: 

“GoLand helps me every day with my professional work. I remember how much of a pain it was back when you had to do everything manually. So I just can’t imagine how I would work without it.”

Alex’s message for Go developers who don’t already use GoLand was:

“Give it a try. It’s easy to install. It’s easy to use. It’s easy to try. Go for it!”

Thank you for the interview and the kind words, Alexander! 

If you want to tell your story, don’t be shy! Tweet us @GoLandIDE or send us an email. 

The GoLand team