Before we get into the topics for today I want to give a massive shout out to [Techworld with Nana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyUHQIec83I) and this fantastic concise journey through the fundamentals of Go.
On [Day8](day08.md) we set our environment up, on [Day9](day09.md) we walked through the Hello #90DaysOfDevOps code and on [Day10](day10.md) we looked at our Go workspace and went a little deeper into compiling and running the code.
Let's start by planning our application, I think it would be a good idea to work on a program that tells us how many days we have remained in our #90DaysOfDevOps challenge.
The first thing to consider here is that as we are building our app and we are welcoming our attendees and we are giving the user feedback on the number of days they have completed we might use the term #90DaysOfDevOps many times throughout the program. This is a great use case to make #90DaysOfDevOps a variable within our program.
- Like a little box with our saved information or values.
- We can then use this variable across the program which also benefits that if this challenge or variable changes then we only have to change this in one place. This means we could translate this to other challenges we have in the community by just changing that one variable value.
To declare this in our Go Program we define a value by using a **keyword** for variables. This will live within our `func main` block of code that you will see later. You can find more about [Keywords](https://go.dev/ref/spec#Keywords) here.
Remember to make sure that your variable names are descriptive. If you declare a variable you must use it or you will get an error, this is to avoid possible dead code, code that is never used. This is the same for packages not used.
We also know that our challenge is 90 days at least for this challenge, but next, maybe it's 100 so we want to define a variable to help us here as well. However, for our program, we want to define this as a constant. Constants are like variables, except that their value cannot be changed within code (we can still create a new app later on down the line with this code and change this constant but this 90 will not change while we are running our application)
Finally, and this won't be the end of our program we will come back to this in [Day12](day12.md) to add more functionality. We now want to add another variable for the number of days we have completed the challenge.
Here are some other examples that I have used to make the code easier to read and edit. We have up till now been using `Println` but we can simplify this by using `Printf` by using `%v` which means we define our variables in order at the end of the line of code. we also use `\n` for a line break.
I am using `%v` as this uses a default value but there are other options that can be found here in the [fmt package documentation](https://pkg.go.dev/fmt) you can find the code example [day11_example4.go](Go/day11_example4.go)
Variables may also be defined in a simpler format in your code. Instead of defining that it is a `var` and the `type` you can code this as follows to get the same functionality but a nice cleaner and simpler look for your code. This will only work for variables though and not constants.
In the above examples, we have not defined the type of variables, this is because we can give it a value here and Go is smart enough to know what that type is or at least can infer what it is based on the value you have stored. However, if we want a user to input this will require a specific type.
It is also important to note that each data type can do different things and behaves differently. For example, integers can multiply where strings do not.
I would also suggest [Techworld with Nana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyUHQIec83I&t=2023s) at this point covers in detail a lot about the data types in Go.
