In today's world, telemetry and ads are everywhere. Personally, I'm sick and tired of it. I wanted my network to actually feel like my own. Then it struck me: I'm a software engineer with systems and network experience. Why not put that to use and build a DNS resolver from scratch? The protocol is well-documented for anyone willing to read RFC 1035. So I got started. Here's what I learned, you can find the project here.
For context, or if you've been snooping around my GitHub, you might have noticed I built my own HTTP server with no additional dependencies. So the natural conclusion would be: ah, this is just a copy-paste project. I thought so too, until I read the RFC and realised DNS works with bits and octets, not JSON and routes. That's when I knew this would take real effort. And that's exactly why I was excited. I once again chose Go for this since its concurrency is just excellent when handling async network traffic.
Getting Started
I got started, as I do with most projects nowadays, by setting up the Docker environment and a GitHub Actions pipeline so I could continuously produce quality tests and ensure my program would always build. I also decided to structure my project by feature instead of by layer. This is standard in Go but quite new for me. Instead of having layers such as HTTP, domain, data, and infrastructure, I organised by packages: dns for the resolver, cache for caching, and so on. This way I could move faster without breaking things, and my packages were far more modular.
