I was working on a personal project recently.

A job scraper.

And in the process, I came across a pattern that’s genuinely changed how I think about structuring backend systems in Go.

It's called the Pipeline Pattern. And as it turns out, it actually shows up in a lot of places - payments, analytics, APIs, etc.

In this article, I’ll be walking you through it using my job scraper project. Which is actually a perfect use case for this pattern, as you’ll see.

The Mess We're Trying to Avoid

Now before I show you the pattern, let me show you what the code could look like without it.

Now essentially what my scraper does is this:

Scrape job listings from multiple sources

Normalize them (i.e., clean them up)

Score them based on keywords (The most relevant to my skillset get the highest scores)

Save them to a database.

So initially what I might have done, was something like this (simplified):

for _ , raw := range rawJobs { // normalize raw . Title = strings . TrimSpace ( raw . Title ) raw .…