Renowned computer scientist and distributed systems researcher John Ousterhout has called software design a “black art” — practiced by many, understood by few, and talked about openly by almost no one. At Stanford, Ousterhout attempts to educate undergraduates in these dark arts. Students in his CS 190: Software Design Studio course must implement the Raft consensus protocol, receive feedback, re-architect, and refactor as a means of learning how to decompose complex problems through code. For veteran Golang programmers, the alchemy required to design such systems may seem unremarkable, and we can forget how magic Go’s concurrency and memory management felt at first blush. However, by voicing our favorite programming techniques (aka “spells”) aloud we can sharpen our gifts, empower new apprentices, and better defend our codebases from wickedness and misfortune. With the goal of transforming these dark arts into everyday practical magic, come along and explore the lessons of Ousterhout’s course (and subsequent book) through the lens of Go, and set against a backdrop of choices made in the design of a distributed system.