The Express.js of Go: Familiarity Meets Performance
For developers coming from a Node.js background, the minimalist and unopinionated nature of frameworks like Express.js is a familiar and productive environment. Fiber brings that same philosophy to the world of Go, providing an API that is heavily inspired by Express, but built on top of Fasthttp, one of Go's fastest HTTP engines. This combination offers the best of both worlds: a gentle learning curve for developers familiar with Express, and the raw performance and concurrency benefits of Go.
However, this familiarity can be a trap. A developer who simply treats Fiber as "Express in Go" will fail to leverage the underlying principles of the Go language, especially its strong typing and concurrency model, and may build applications that are unidiomatic and do not perform as well as they should. This playbook explains how Axiom Cortex vets for the ability to blend the productivity of an Express-like framework with the discipline of a true Go engineer. For different approaches within the Go ecosystem, see our playbooks for Gin.
How Axiom Cortex Evaluates Fiber Developers
Our vetting process is designed to find engineers who can build robust and performant APIs by combining the simplicity of Fiber with the power of Go.
Dimension 1: Fiber Fundamentals
This dimension tests a candidate's fluency with the core features of the Fiber framework.
- Routing and Middleware: Can they design a clean routing structure? Can they write and apply custom middleware for cross cutting concerns like logging or authentication?
- Context and Request Handling: Do they understand Fiber's `Context` object and how to use it to handle requests and send responses efficiently?
Dimension 2: Go Idioms in a Fiber Context
This dimension tests a candidate's ability to write clean, idiomatic Go code within a Fiber application.
- Error Handling: Do they have a clear strategy for handling errors and returning appropriate HTTP status codes?
- Concurrency: Do they understand how to handle concurrent operations safely, for example, when making multiple downstream API calls within a single request handler?
Building for Speed and Simplicity
When you staff your team with engineers who have passed the Fiber Axiom Cortex assessment, you are investing in a team that can rapidly build and deploy high performance web services. They will be able to leverage their existing knowledge of Express-like frameworks while benefiting from the massive performance and concurrency advantages of Go, allowing your team to build faster APIs with less code. This skill set is critical for projects where both development velocity and runtime performance are top priorities, similar to those using other performance-focused frameworks like Fastify or FastAPI.