Play with Go is a set of hands-on, interactive tutorials for learning the tools used while programming in Go. In this episode we are joined by its creators, Paul Jolly and Marcos Nils, as we learn more about what motivated the creation of the project, what technology it was built on, and how you can help contribute additional guides to help your fellow gophers!

Join Mat Ryer for a fun conversation with Kris Brandow, Angelica Hill, and Natalie Pistunovich about how these Gophers get work/life done in this crazy world! Expect to learn about work environment must-haves, communication tips & tricks, developer tool recommendations, and much more!

Monitoring and debugging distributed systems is hard. In this episode, we catch up with Kelsey Hightower, Stevenson Jean-Pierre, and Carlisia Thompson to get their insights on how to approach these challenges and talk about the tools and practices that make complex distributed systems more observable.

When we talk about improving a programming language, we often think about what features we would add. Things like generics in Go, async/away in JS, etc. In this episode we take a different approach and talk about what we would remove from Go to make it better.

Paul Smith (from “Obama’s Trauma Team”) tells us the tale of how Go played a big role in the rescuing and rebuilding of the HealthCare.gov website. Along the way we learn what the original team did wrong, how the rescue team kept it afloat during huge traffic spikes, and what they’ve done since to rebuild it to serve the people’s needs.

In this episode we discuss Mislav’s experience building not one, but two Github CLIs - hub and gh. We dive into questions like, “What lead to the decision to completely rewrite the CLI in Go?”, “How were you testing the CLI, especially during the transition?”, and “What Go libraries are you using to build your CLI?”

With Gophercon rapidly approaching, we go behind the scenes to find out what it takes to deliver the world’s largest Go conference.

Can’t find a job working in Go? Perhaps introducing your current team to Go is the solution. In this episode we talk about how Go was introduced at different organizations, potential pitfalls that may sabotage your efforts, some advice on how to convince your team and CTO to use Go and more.

What is cloud native? In this episode Johnny and Aaron explain it to Mat and Jon. They then dive into questions like, “What problems does this solve?” and “Why was Go such a good fit for this space?”

In this episode we dive into teaching Go, asking questions like, “What techniques work well for teaching programming?”, “What role does community play in education?”, and “What are the best ways to improve at Go as a beginner/intermediate/senior dev?”

Brad Fitzpatrick returns to the show (last heard on episode 44) to field a mixed bag of questions from Johnny, Mat, and the live listeners. How’d he get in to programming? What languages did he use before Go? What’s he up to now that he’s not working on the Go language? And of course… does he have any unpopular opinions he’d like to share? 😏

A community Q&A special. You asked the questions, and we discussed them live on air. A few example questions include “When is it okay to use init?”, “When should we use constructors?”, and “How should Go code be structured?”

This episode is different than what you’re used to. We’ve been clipping highlights of the show for awhile now to share on Twitter and YouTube. A side effect of that effort is a bunch of awesome clips just sitting on Jerod’s hard drive collecting digital dust. So, here’s a beta test of a “best of” style clips show covering the summer months. Let us know if you like it!

A deep dive on Fuzzing and a close look at the official Fuzzing proposal for Go.

Building desktop applications is tricky. Every OS has its own set of tools, and you often need to learn a new language for each. In this episode we talk with Wails creator Lea Anthony about how the build tool enables developers to create desktop apps using Go and their normal JS frontend (React, Vue, Anguluar, or whatever you want).

Francesc Campoy and Isobel Redelmeier joins the panel to discuss Go’s context package including real-world insights into its use and misuse.

Infra, Devops, Systems Engineer, SRE, and the list goes on and on. What do these terms mean? Why does every job listing for the same role seem to entail different responsibiliities? Why is it important for developers to be familiar with the infrastructure their code is running on? Tune in to gain some insights into all of this and more!

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is used all over the web as a text-based way of transmitting data. In this episode, we explore Go’s encoding/json package, and others with Daniel Marti.

Robert and Ian join us to talk about the latest updates on generics in Go. What type of feedback are they looking for as developers get their hands on tools designed to experiment with generics and Go? What was the deal with the featherweight Go paper that also discussed generics? Why can’t we use angle brackets for generics?

The panel discuss testing frameworks in Go. After a brief overview of the concepts involved, we discuss how testing frameworks can make our lives easier, and why some people still choose to avoid them. Mat Ryer and Mark Bates chat with Boyan Soubachov about the future of the Testify project.

Your first week with a new programming language can be tricky. In this episode Jon is joined by Jacquie and DaShaun to talk about their first week with Go. What was their primary focus? What resources did they leverage? What made it stick, and what didn’t?

Choosing a database is hard. They each have their pros and cons, and without much experience it is hard to determine which is the best fit for your project. In this episode Johan Brandhorst joins us to talk about Postgres. When is it a good fit? How well does it scale? What libraries exist in Go for using Postgres?

Building a new app in Go can involve a lot of technical decisions. How will your code be structured? How will you handle background jobs? What will your deploy process look like? In this episode we will walk through the decisions made while building the public release of Pace.dev.

Leaning from mistakes is key to progressing. In this episode Ben, Aaron, Kris, and Jon discuss some of our mistakes - like spending too much time designing a feature that isn’t that important, or using channels excessively when first learning Go - and how we learned from them.

Mat Ryer talks to a new full-time Go programmer, an intern at Google, and a high-school programmer about the tech world from their perspective.

Mat, Jon, and Jaana discuss reflection and meta programming. How do other languages use reflection, and how does that differ from Go’s approach? What libraries are using reflection well? What are some examples of bad times to use reflect? What alternative approaches exist? And what are those weird struct tags I keep seeing in Go code?

Databases are tricky, especially at scale. In this episode Mat, Jaana, and Jon discuss different types of databases, the pros and cons of each, along with the many ways developers can have issues with databases. They also explore questions like, “Why are serial IDs problematic?” and “What alternatives are there if we aren’t using serial IDs?” while at it.

Johnny and Jon are joined by Denise to talk about her role at GitHub and what the community and safety team does to help open source project creators and contributors, GoCon Canada and the role of organizing a conference, and more.

Distributed systems are hard. Building a distributed messaging system for these systems to communicate is even harder. In this episode, we unpack some of the challenges of building distributed messaging systems (like NATS), including how Go makes that easy and/or hard as applicable.

Put on your dark hoodie, turn all the lights off, and join the author of Black Hat Go as we explore the darker side of Go.