I learned about pointers 10 years ago… and I hated them. I still hate them. But now at least I can explain them, which, by some strange software industry law, qualifies me for a senior dev role.

Flashback: Engineering School and Existential Crisis

Back in electronics engineering, we were handed C++ for one semester and told, “Here, go build your future.” By Day 2, we were doing pointers - not the helpful kind, but the kind that break your code, your compiler, and your soul.

Parallel to that, I was working with an 8085 processor - an experience that felt like coding inside the Matrix, except there was no red pill. I wasn’t writing programs. I was writing memory access violations in multiple languages.

Naturally, I quit programming.

I nearly pivoted into project management… until I opened Jira. That’s when I ran back to engineering.

Flash forward 10 years. I’ve been doing Python for a year and a half now - data science, machine learning, the whole vibe. No semicolons. No manual memory management. No existential crisis. Right?

Right?

Wrong. Because one day I decided, for some reason, to try Golang.

First Week of Go: Guess Who’s Back?

Apparently, real developers don’t use pandas. They build APIs at 3AM and argue about Vim configs on Reddit.

And within the first week: pointers. Again.

So What Is a Pointer?

Let’s break it down.

Imagine you’re a dev with imposter syndrome. You don’t tell people the answer, maybe because you can’t - you just give them a reference to Stack Overflow. Congratulations, that’s a pointer.

(I really do hope you are not sending people to Stack Overflow in 2025.)

More formally: a pointer doesn’t hold a value, it holds the address of a value. Like saying:

“I won’t give you the actual pizza, but here are the GPS coordinates of where it’s sitting.”

Pointers in Go: Code Time

In Go, you declare a pointer using a * and dereference it using * again.

a := 10
b := &a   // b is a pointer to a
fmt.Println(b)  // prints something like 0x1400012a008

To get the actual value from b, you do:

fmt.Println(*b) // prints 10

Seems simple? Just wait.

Why Use Pointers?

If you’re wondering “Why do I even need pointers?” — congratulations, you’re officially a Python developer.

But here’s the thing: pointers let you pass variables around efficiently. Instead of copying data, you just share its address. It’s safe house, but for your variables. Unless someone moves your variables around.

But They’re Dangerous

Pointers are powerful, sure - but also a great way to cause memory leaks, panic-inducing bugs, and passive-aggressive code reviews.

They’re like handing your intern root access and saying “do whatever you want.”

A pointer is like this:

“Go check drawer #3 in the kitchen.”

Now, if someone moved the knife to drawer #2 and didn’t tell you - congratulations, you just segmentation-faulted in real life.

So Where Am I Now?

I still kind of hate pointers. But now, I understand them. And that’s a milestone.

I’m somewhere between:

  • finally learning how async works, and
  • giving up on Arch Linux for good.

So if you’re currently crying over a dereference error don’t panic, don’t rage quit, and maybe don’t listen to ThePrimeagen (unless you want to rewrite everything in Rust).

Just remember:

A pointer is like that weird always high friend who doesn’t give you the answer. They just whisper where to find it.

May your dereferences never be nil.