In this first part of our Go Desktop Agent series, we’ll explore the architectural decisions and the real-world problems this agent solves.
The Problem: Reaching Users Where They Are
System administrators, DevOps engineers, and IT professionals often face a critical challenge: how do you reliably notify users about important system events when they’re focused on their work? Email gets buried, Slack messages get missed, and web dashboards require active monitoring. What’s needed is a system that can break through the noise and deliver timely, actionable notifications directly to the desktop.
A New Series on Building Cross-Platform Desktop Applications with Go
I’m excited to announce a new series of blog posts focused on building a multiplatform desktop notification agent using Go. This series will walk you through the architecture, implementation details, and design decisions behind the Go Desktop Agent project. It is meant to be inspirational, and used as a starting point to build your own.
What is the Go Desktop Agent?
The Go Desktop Agent is a cross-platform desktop notification system that uses Redis pub/sub for message delivery and reply handling. It runs as a background service with a system tray presence, allowing applications to send desktop notifications across Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms. We worked on this idea at a client but we used Python libraries and AWS services as backend. Java also came up as an idea, but I also really liked the idea of trying this with Go.
Key Features
The agent provides several powerful features:
Cross-platform desktop notifications - Works seamlessly..(well almost, or at least better than expected!) on Windows, macOS, and Linux
System tray integration - Gopher-branded icon with interactive menu, which is not my best creation (sorry!)
Redis pub/sub messaging - Scalable message delivery using Redis
Interactive notifications - True OK/Cancel dialog buttons with response handling
Reply channel mechanism - Machine-specific response channels based on hostname
Zero configuration - Works out of the box with sensible defaults
Platform-specific native dialogs - Uses native UI components on each platform
