I wanted my next side project to look like the kind of code I'd ship at work — hexagonal architecture, sqlc, depguard, integration tests — without the usual side-project tax of spending three evenings on scaffolding before writing the first line of domain logic. So I built it twice. First, I forked a Go backend template I'd been hardening for months. Then I drove every feature on top of it through a structured AI workflow I call qrspi: question → research → structure → plan → implement.
The product itself is unremarkable on purpose: a QR code generator. Paste a URL, get back a scannable PNG and a /r/:token redirect, with per-link scan counts and a soft-delete kill switch. The interesting part — the part I'd want a reviewer to look at — is the process that produced it.
Repo: linkc0829/go-qrcode-generator. Every artifact mentioned in this post is committed there.
Step 1: Choose the template, then commit to its rules
Step zero was actually choosing what to build on. I shortlisted several Go backend templates, walked through each one with Claude to pressure-test the architecture, and landed on the one I'd been hardening for a while: linkc0829/go-backend-template.
