golink VS f5go

Something else interesting they're doing is their tsnet package, which lets you join your process to the tailnet and bind tcp listeners/connect to TCP services via their tailnet IP or subnet.

I'm writing some stuff using this at the moment, but I also just saw https://github.com/tailscale/golink which does the same thing: a single binary that runs a link shortener that joins itself to your tailnet.

tl;dr: don't run your service on a machine then join that to tailnet, directly bind your service to an in-memory tailnet client

I wrote the one for F5, in 2011 I believe. I didn't know specifically about Google's at the time, but the general concept was in the air. I was inspired by the old-schoool CompuServe (or was it AOL?) "go " command. Bill Booth worked to get f5go open-sourced a few years after that [1].

And I'm glad you appreciated f5go's additional features; my personal favorite is the "lists" feature: a single go/ link can become a list of links very easily. Very useful for gathering research on a topic into a single place. I keep wanting to setup a personal f5go server so I can share short mnemonic links that might be lists lke this.

[1] https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5go