time.Time vs null

[flint fjord]

Assume I have a struct with updatedAt time.Time, which has zero value until actual update is in place. How is this usually solved in Go?

Saving this to a database doesn't cause problems, but reading does - I managed to not use sql.NullTime by not making the field nullable in the db but save 0000-00-00 00:00:00 instead.
Another gimmick appears when marshaling (encoding) to JSON - by default it will return 0001-01-01 something (time.Time's zero value equivalent). Is there any tag that inserts null on zero value, or I do have to create my own type or marshal method and handle that manually?

[narrow pewter]

sql.NullTime should be fine as you can access the underlying time, you can also use https://github.com/guregu/null

[flint fjord]

I wonder if my main struct should have *time.Time that can be nil instead of zero value, or time.Time and have consumer check for zero value

[narrow pewter]

you can also use the pointer variant

you can easily be getting into nil pointer exceptions though if you dont check against it everytime you try to access it

[flint fjord]

So, is there preferred way?