Hey everyone! Buffers aren’t just a feature of Go channels. They’re a general concept in software engineering and system design. We usually rely on them when tasks arrive faster than we can process them — basically when the workload exceeds our immediate computation capacity.

The first time I encountered buffers was in Go’s buffered channels, but once I understood the concept, I started seeing them everywhere: connection pools, worker pools, queues, and more.

In the video attached, I walk through a few simple examples and even animated the idea a bit to make it easier to understand.

In short: a buffer is just temporary storage that smooths out differences between the rate of incoming work and the rate of processing.

If you have any questions or notice anything I got wrong, I’d love to hear your thoughts!