GopherCon 2017: A Retrospective

Alright everybody, welcome back to another episode of GoTime. Today’s episode is number 53. On the show today we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Carlisia Pinto is also on the show…

Hi, everybody.

And Brian Ketelsen…

Hello.

And it seems like something big just happened a couple weeks ago that we should spend this episode talking on…

I know what it is - I dyed my head purple. [laughter]

Do you think we could fit a whole hour to talk about that? I think we could talk about that for at least three or four…

I think we could talk about it for quite a while; it’s amazing just how much feedback I’ve gotten on it, from random strangers, high fives in airports… I’m serious, it’s crazy. Most of them are thinking “That guy is too old to have purple hair, so let’s high five him and make him feel better”, but hey, whatever…

Are you getting selfie pictures, too?

Yes, actually… In fact, it happened at GopherCon, which is I know what you were REALLY meaning to talk about the thing that happened a couple weeks ago…

I suppose we could talk about that…

We were outside next to the bear, and some kid walks up with purple hair and he goes “Is it okay if my mom takes a picture with you and me together?” I was like, “Heck yeah!”

I love it, by the way.

I think it’s fun.

I think so, too.

So for anybody who’s not aware, as we’re recording this today on the 3rd of August, so this is about two weeks ago, GopherCon occurred, which is a very large conference for the Go programming language, in case you’re not already familiar; that happens in July every year. We spent three days there, four if you include workshop days.

Anybody want to talk about overall thoughts and just kind of feelings walking away, excitement?

Man, we need to be more precise, because I don’t know where to begin…

Yeah, the energy level was insane. It was just constant high energy, and everybody came up and told me specifically that they just felt like the energy this year was higher than any other year and it just felt like such a fun happening, happy place to be.

I can’t gauge it anymore because it’s my third one, and every year I go, I meet more people, so every year it’s more comfortable, and I don’t know “Okay, is it better because I know more people, which I like? Or is it better because the conference is better?”, but I think this year it was apparently both - the conference was at a higher level; the band was amazing… A bunch of Go developers who are also musicians and singers got together and rehearsed and played at the opening party, and I felt like I was on drugs; I felt so happy…

It’s Denver, are you sure you weren’t on drugs?

[03:52] Yeah, I don’t think I was… I was just drinking; I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know, because it’s Denver. But I felt like it! And it made me feel so happy looking at other Go developers who were also happy, and dancing, and having the greatest time… So thank you so much for everybody who played in that band and people who had the idea to put it together and approved the whole thing, because it was awesome.

Yeah, there were so many great people doing that… So if you weren’t at GopherCon or you skipped the welcome party, what Carlisia is talking about is at the welcome party at the Punch Bowl Social, we had a full fair-level stage with lighting and stuff set up, and there was a local band there that kind of filled the air with music, but later a group of community members actually got up and sang and played instruments. I wonder if I can name everybody off without missing anybody.

It’s gonna be tough, there were a lot of people.

Yeah, and Brian was also in the band…

Mark Bates… [laughs]

Yeah, Mark Bates, Cassandra Salisbury,Vanessa, Kris Nova… Who else? Brian Downs…

Yeah, Roger Peppe

Jaana, JBD…

Yeah, JBD…

And it was really awesome though, because everybody kind of got up there and performed, and the band that was there kind of backfilled positions that we didn’t have community members for. That was actually Brian’s idea to do the band thing.

Kyle… Wasn’t Kyle in the band as well? I forgot his last name. From Denver… No, I don’t know.

No, no.

It was really great, and one of the things I loved about that, and I was telling – it might have been Adam, when they were doing the little Changelog interviews I was talking about that one of the things I love the most about that is we often admire people for their technical abilities and everything, but we also forget that everybody kind of has hobbies and hidden talents, and it’s really great to see a bunch of people share theirs with us.

Let me also say that I’m a really bad introvert, and I had that realization after this GopherCon… So this is what a good introvert looks like, and I know this because I’ve seen one - Katrina Owen, sometimes you see her at a conference and she’ll be walking out in the middle of the day and you’re like “Where are you going?” and she’s like “I’m going to my hotel and I’m gonna rest.” That’s a good introvert.

A bad introvert like me just keeps on going… That’s what I do every time I go to a conference, I just keep going, morning, day and night, and I don’t ever say no to meeting somebody or having dinner or having drinks. Man, I was so exhausted when I came back, I couldn’t even function. So next time I need to take at least a couple days off afterwards.

I’m in that camp too, the bad introvert camp, where I overwhelm myself a whole week, and then I go home and it’s like “Nobody talk to me.”

Yeah, “I’m in my cave.”

I need to recharge…

It’s hard though, when you get that much interaction, that much social pressure, condensed, and then you’re done… It’s just like “Okay, I’m done. I don’t wanna talk to people, I don’t wanna talk to nobody. No, no, no. Just leave me alone. I’ll be in my cave.” I don’t know if there’s a better way to deal with it, but it’s certainly difficult for me.

One thing too that I wanted to point out from the earlier point that Carlisia made is this was kind of like the biggest one yet, but I felt a lot more – I don’t wanna say any of the prior years didn’t have that tight-knit community feeling, because they really did… But I feel like it’s getting even tighter. A lot of people I think felt like it’d get lost with the growth; that’s one of the things they loved so much about the first year. But I think that a lot of the stuff has really kind of come back, and so many people socializing and collaborating on stuff, especially community day. Community day was awesome.

[08:23] All of it was, everything about it was just fantastic.

My most memorable day – I mean, this has nothing to do with the conference, it’s more about me… It is about me now - I had dinner twice. [laughter]

In one night?

In one night. I had the Women Who Go dinner, which I couldn’t miss, of course, and then I had another dinner that I also didn’t wanna miss. I’m like “Okay, so I eat two salads in one”, and then I went and had a regular dinner afterwards.

That’s funny.

Yeah, life is tough when you go to GopherCon.

I had a never-ending dinner one night… Was it the first night? I think it was workshop day, so the night most people came in traveling. We were in the – what’s the name of the restaurant downstairs?

The Buffalo burger place? Stout Street Social.

Stout Street Social, which is directly across the street from the Convention Center, and downstairs from where a lot of us were staying… And we met a group of people that were there; Brian, I think you were part of the initial group, or maybe you weren’t… But there were like 10-15 people there, at this long table, and we were there for hours… And it was like a group would get up, and a new group would join. They rotated out at least 8-9 times throughout the night. I don’t even know how many checks came, but it was kind of funny, because we were just there basically all night. It was constantly new people, I didn’t have to go anywhere.

I came and went three times during the course of that… Like six hours.

You did, you did come back… [laughs]

So yes, I agree, that was the longest dinner ever. Every time I was surprised to see you there. [laughter]

Like, “You haven’t bailed yet?”

So I mentioned the Women Who Go dinner, and that reminds me to talk about this - we’re definitely gonna get to the talks and other things, but I wanna mention about the diversity efforts and how many women were there. I think it’s safe to say that we had about 60 women (you guys can correct me) at the conference.

This year was the first year that it was noticeable that there were women at the conference. And there was such a big effort to increase the number of people from diverse backgrounds with the scholarships that we had, and I also realized some people who didn’t go, who could have applied, didn’t know about it, so heads up for next year; this is probably gonna be a thing every year. We have the conference, and other organizations have funds to send people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to go. So make sure you keep an eye on that and apply.

So from those applications we got a bunch of people, and the Women Who Go dinner was packed. I think there were 50 women there. We got a nice gift from Azure, the power charger thing, a portable charger… Which is not a flask, Joshua, it’s an actual charger… [laughter]

No alcohol involved…?

It’s not that kind of charger, although that would have been welcome for me, too. Now that I think about it, I think I’m gonna fix that problem, because I don’t have a flask, anyway.

And we had also the buddy system that was before, and people who have gone to the conference can sign up to be a guide, and people who had never been to the conference can sign up to be a buddy, and we had a nice breakfast. Andy Walker lead that effort, and he did such a great job. We got beautiful pins…

[12:08] So we had a breakfast, and I got to meet a bunch of people who I’d never heard of before, and some who I’d heard of online but never met in person. It was beautiful, and it was great to see those people mingling in the conference as well. What else…?

You know, international travel, too. Each year we know there’s a large number of countries represented… I wanna say this year it was like 33, or something like that. So I know the number of countries, but at the beginning when Brian and I were doing the welcome notes, and I asked everybody to sit down based on location, and we got to the international people, I was not expecting that many people to still be standing.

Yeah, I was blown away by the international travel.

That’s a long flight, to Denver…

Yeah, we had a lot of international scholarship recipients. We had people from Brazil, from India… It was really cool.

Oh, Nathan Youngman in the Slack channel brought up a good point, too - at the very end of the conference we always have leftover swag and stuff and we usually donate it… This year we decided to sell it just for pre-funding next year’s diversity initiatives. Now I wish I had written down that figure exactly…

It was over 12k…

Yeah, it was 12k and some change that we raised already… So that’s awesome.

It is. That’s a really good seat for next year’s diversity. So amazing… Thank you, everyone.

Speaking of Nathan Youngman, one of my most memorable moments of the conference was on the workshop day, when I walked around the corner and I saw some really skinny, Alton Brown-looking guy standing at the water cooler, and I did a full-on cartoon double take… And a moment later I said “Is that you, Nathan?” He has lost so much weight, he looks fantastic; I think we all need to give him a big round of applause for kicking ass and taking names and getting healthy. Nobody recognized him. It was completely amazing. Good job getting healthy, Nathan. It actually inspired me - since GopherCon I’ve lost 21 pounds because you inspired me.

Yes. And you know what? I had the same reaction, I had to do a double take with Nathan; I was like “Oh…” Because I had seen his pictures on Twitter, I knew he lost weight, so I was prepared to see that, but I still had to do a double take. And I mentioned on Twitter, and I’ve been very loose about it - I think we should get together, people who want to have a health goal for next GopherCon… To lose 10 pounds, or 20 pounds, or reach like “I wanna lift this amount of weights”, or anything. We should get together and just motivate each other. I don’t know what to do to get the people around this effort. I don’t necessarily have the time to lead and come up with a plan, but if someone wants to do it… I definitely have a health goal for next year, and I’d be willing to do it. So there… [laughs]

That’s good. I think it’s a great idea.

Yeah, developers getting healthier, definitely.

Yeah, every year I see the runners… There’s generally groups of people who go off and run in the city, in the morning, bright and early…

That’s not me.

This year sadly missing Brad Fitzpatrick, though… All of our best to you, Brad. I know they’re moments away from baby delivery, so if you’re listening or if you do listen later, we hope that everything goes well with your delivery.

[16:01] Yeah, definitely.

Babies rock, and Gopher babies rock more.

Right? Does the doctor give a “Looks good to me” thumb, too?

Yeah. It has to go through Jerod.

[laughs] So we can either talk a bit about community day, or we can talk about talks first, and do them chronologically, in the order they occurred at the conference…

No… That’s way too structured for us. We can make that plan now, but we’ll get sidetracked so fast that we’ll feel like we didn’t have a plan to begin with. I think that’s a poor choice for us. I think we should just continue to free-form. Otherwise we look disorganized.

Free-form away, Brian! Lead us into the free-forming world!

Erik brings up community day, and I think the standout awesome from community day was the Contributor Room that the Go team put together. That was so amazing… I don’t remember the final count of people ( I wanna say it was like 150 people), but lots and lots of people went in and had mentors that helped them get through the a little bit onerous process of setting up an environment to contribute to the Go project.

I wanna say that there were, on that day alone, 40 contributions accepted and a lot more made, and I’m sure since then, many of those that were submitted have been accepted, too. So just a huge, huge shoutout to Steve Francia and others who set up that room, and the mentors who helped enable it, because it was truly awesome seeing all those people contributing to Go.

They had a little dashboard going for points for types of contributions.

I wanna say something about that, because I was there as a participant. It was amazing. I so loved that they did that, and I hope they do it every year. Actually, I talked to Steve, and I mentioned to him - and I wasn’t the only one to mention this - that we should have that twice a year or maybe four times a year, and get the Go meetups together to do that as a team, as a group, around the world. Maybe we can have it in different time zones.

But anyway, so there were two separate things we were doing in that room. One was going through the process – they had something like a fake repo, and we were going through the process of submitting to Go, except that we weren’t submitting to the Go repo, we were submitting to this fake repo. But the point was to get you to go through the process, and having someone there to comment on your submission and maybe ask you to make a change, or correct a submission, make a correction and submit again, until you went through the whole process and got your submission completed. Then your change was pushed to that repo.

That was to get you through the process, and I don’t wanna say it was simple, because you know, simple is very relative. I had done that before, I’m very familiar with Git, which helps, but I wanna say that there were so many people there to help. I actually got help - somebody was teaching me how to interpret, because I was reading the instruction on how to add an example, and I was having a hard time understanding the shortcuts the documentation was using… And this guy explained it to me, and I was like “Oh, that’s what it means…! Thank you.”

So that was one thing… And like Erik was saying, they had this dashboard, and there were like a thousand submissions, I think, just in one session. There were two sessions - one in the morning, one in the afternoon. So I highly recommend people who haven’t gone through the process to go to this workshop (it’s free) if they are at GopherCon in the future.

[20:03] And the other thing was like “Okay, you went through this process. How about now you go and make a submission to the Go repo?” and that’s where the 40 submissions come from. A lot of people submitted code, or an example, or documentation, and they became Go contributors.

One of the things that I thought was really fantastic about it was the Phoenix users group, I think. They took that same material and brought it home for their Go meetup. Was that you, Brian Downs? I’m pretty sure it was. He did a contributor workshop right after GopherCon and spread it even further. So my callout to the meetup organizers out there is to find that material and push it out, spread the love; let’s get more people contributing to Go, because that was a really great idea.

Yeah, it really is easy to follow – the workshop format is easy to follow, it’s easy to replicate… The reason why I said I would like the Go team to do it more purposefully is that I would wish somebody from the Go team (a couple people) would be there to approve the submissions and give immediate feedback, until people went through the process and they got the submission pushed through. That’s the only difference…

Going through the process and making a first initial submission is really – I hate saying “simple”, but it’s pretty straightforward.

No, but it’s intimidating. The idea of getting all set up is intimidating, to me. I remember – it’s been years since I did my first, but I remember spending a lot of time staring at the documents and thinking “How in the world…?” because it’s not just a PR; it’s not even close to just a PR.

Yeah, I meant for organizers who would be teaching people… Because what makes it simple for attendees is to have people there to help them. Once people explain it to you, they keep explaining however much you need, then in the end you’ll hopefully be like “Oh yeah, okay, I get it now.” At some point you’re going to get it.

Yeah, I agree. That was the magic that made it all work well - having so many mentors there.

I think that there’s also a degree of motivation there, too…. Because there’s kind of the process of getting your – what do they call it? Where you’ve gotta get added to be able to submit…

The CLA?

Yeah. Did they make everybody there submit a CLA?

I’m sure they did, yeah.

So that ends up being a barrier to entry, and a lot of people feel like “Oh, well…” and Ashley McNamara mentioned this in her talk, too - you don’t have to be a wizard or a genius to contribute, but a lot of people feel that way, and then when there’s this additional barrier to entry, I think that that’s even more “Should I go through this process? Are my contributions really wanted? I’m not (insert name of big Go person here).” So I think having that room dedicated to “anybody/everybody show up”… We wanna help get you set up and get you submitting, and all contributions are welcome. I think there is a motivational aspect to that, that “Okay, well maybe I should try this out.”

It was a good initiative, so Steve Francia, Jess Frazelle, Russ Cox, all the people who made that happen behind the scenes - our biggest congratulations for pulling off such an awesome show. It was a good deal.

And Brad Fitzpatrick, who even though he wasn’t able to make it, he was there reviewing everybody’s stuff…

And he had a concurrency of Gophers next to him helping out, with this “Looks good to me” shirt on. It was awesome.

You know, “concurrency” is the collective noun for a group of Gophers, right? A concurrency of Gophers. [laughter]

That is true, right?

I’m sure it is.

[24:03] Yeah, it is true now.

If not, we’ve declared it so, right Carlisia?

Absolutely.

Another room that takes place there every year is the GoBot room, put on by the Hybrid Group. That room is always packed, and it’s really cool. That also had a lot of people contributing back to the GoBot project to support new hardware.

Yeah, that room was really cool this year. I went by – I didn’t hang out in the room a lot, but I went by five or six times and every single time I went, I saw kids from the family day activities, in the room, on the floor, controlling Spheros, or something like that. It was amazing to me that Ron was able to engage all of the adults, but he’s just such a good guy, he always had something for the kids, too. He’s something special.

Yeah, there was – I’m trying to remember all of the activities there. There was a data science room, there was a container technologies room, lightning talks… Lightning talk quality was off the hook this year; there was a lot of good talks. I’ve heard and seen a lot of people tweeting about some of the lightning talks. So if you’re the type of person that only watches the normal event videos, all the lightning talks are also on YouTube. You should definitely watch some of those as well. The round tables - that actually was a lot more popular this year…

For anybody who didn’t go to community day or didn’t go to GopherCon at all, on community day, which is the day after the talks, we basically have these rooms set up (that we were just describing) - that contributor room, GoBot room… All of these things where you can collaborate with people, but there’s also kind of like a big, open area with round tables, and you can write the project you’re working on or topic you’re discussing in the table that you’re at, and people can kind of go through the list and join up with people doing similar things. That room was also packed all day.

It was crazy.

I’m really pleased with the number of people who are kind of seeing community day. We had way more people the first year stay than I think we anticipated. It started off as just sort of a “We know most people are probably flying out the day after the talks, and everybody flies out at different times… Maybe we should just rent some space in the hotel that we’re at at the time”, and people can hang out and chat and collaborate on stuff until they have to leave for their flight. Bring your bags, all that good stuff. And a lot of people stayed for that, and each year it’s grown bigger and bigger, where now it’s like a day that most people stay for the whole day. So if you have never been to the community day, you should definitely stay for that. It’s probably one of my favorite days.

I saw at least two, maybe three really big projects that got a lot of lift on community day. The first one was Dep. I know Sam Boyer had at least three tables worth of people, all contributing. I think he started the day hoping that he would get two or three issues closed on GitHub, and he ended up stretching his goals beyond his wildest dreams and got a bunch of stuff done that he wasn’t expecting to even finish this year. So it’s really cool that so many people jumped in on the Dep project and got so much work done.

I know Kris Nova had a Kubicorn table, and I swear to God she looked like a cult leader over there, because they were all just watching her with rapt attention. I’m not sure what kind of things she was telling them, but I know Kubicorn had a pretty nice release, too. So the cult leader is taking over. That was pretty cool.

[28:03] So how about favorite talks? Or at least ones that you heard good feedback on that maybe you didn’t catch yourself. I know that I often don’t get to watch many of the talks (if any) until the video is released, and depending on my work schedule is how fast I consume them.

I can start off… One that seemed to get a very, very good reception - and I actually happened to watch this on YouTube - was just recently a guest of our show, which was Kavya Joshi, who did the Understanding Channels. If you haven’t seen that talk - you weren’t there for it or weren’t at GopherCon - it’s on YouTube. All of the talks from the conference are there.

She walks through the implementation of channels. This isn’t “How do you use them?” but “How do they work under the hood?” and there is a bit of how the runtime works too, with regard to scheduling goroutines that have blocking sends and receives on them.

Yeah, it was a super geeky talk, and it was low-level enough that I think everybody learned something. My favorite part of the talk was at the end, when everybody mobbed her at the stage from the Go Team. [laughter] I turned around to Erik and I said “Somebody’s getting a job offer soon…” [laughter] So yeah, that was a really good talk.

I like Edward Muller’s talk on Go Anti-Patterns; that was a really good talk. He hit the nail on the head on a ton of different things that I’ve been teaching for the last couple years and taught me several that I’ve been abusing for the last couple years. That was a really good talk, if you haven’t caught that one…

That room was busting out the seams.

It was, it was really busy.

It’s one I haven’t caught yet. I haven’t been able to watch that video yet, but it definitely seemed like a really popular talk.

Yeah, everybody should watch that talk, especially beginners… Especially! Please do.

And I don’t think that we could leave out Russ Cox talking about the future of Go, where I think people about dropped dead when he mentioned that it’s time to start thinking about Go 2.

Yeah, but – alright, so I love the Go team and I love Russ, but man, that was the biggest cop-out talk ever. Complete cop-out. So you put on the schedule “The Future of Go”, and start letting rumors slide, “We’re gonna talk about Go 2.0. This is amazing.” Yeah, we’re gonna talk about talking about talking about Go 2.0.

I don’t know that I agree.

No, no, don’t even try to defend him. Don’t do it.

Okay, explain yourself better, I’m not getting – I don’t wanna interpret what you’re saying; just spit it out.

I’m just teasing Russ. I really have nothing bad to say about it at all, but I was just saying that we were teased by the idea that Go 2.0 was coming, and really it was just a talk about how we’re go about talking about Go 2.0.

I think that the Go team and everything has been very much “We’re gonna focus on implementation and bettering that and improving compile times and speed and all that stuff, and we’re not gonna work on changing the language.” So I think that it still is a very exciting thing that collectively they are ready to move on. We as a community have written enough Go code that maybe it’s time to start thinking about that and what that might look like.

But I also think that one of the big takeaways from that talk was soliciting for experience reports, because he walks through kind of the history of how they solve problems and things like that, and they want to see concrete examples of where these things are problems. An example was generics - sometimes they don’t have enough information to help make a meaningful decision as far as how that should impact the language without kind of seeing concrete examples of how people intend to use these things, or how it’s currently failing them.

[32:16] I think that that was probably the biggest takeaway - if you want to help shape what Go 2.0 ultimately becomes, you should make it a point to contribute that feedback.

I was going to say the same thing Erik just said, just not as articulate. But I do wanna re-emphasize that even though it was a talk about “Let’s talk about talking about Go 2.0”, I think it was very valuable… Because people communicate – I mean, it’s just normal… We’re not very effective and sometimes we’re in a hurry, but that talk was basically – I mean, there were other things too, but the main takeaway for me was, like Erik said, Go 2.0 is going to happen, and if you have a problem that is not being solved now that you do want to be solved, submit what your problem is, because we need to understand what kind of problem it is. Don’t submit a feature request. Don’t jump ahead and say “Oh, I have a problem, and I think it will be solved if Go had this… So therefore I am requesting that you add this to Go.”

He was very specifically saying, “Submit your problem. Submit a use case for your problem.” I was reading Reddit, and there were so many people saying, after that talk – I don’t know if they watched it or not, or read about it or not, because there was also a blog post that goes with it… But people were saying “Yeah, we’d love it if Go had this”, and some people pointing out too, “You need to submit your problem, not a feature request.” It’s not about submitting feature requests.

If they had named the talk – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. Please finish.

No, I was just gonna repeat myself; thank you for cutting me off.

[laughs] If he had named the talk “How To Communicate Or Build Consensus On The Forward Movement Of A Project”, then I would give it 12 out of 10. But he named it The Future Of Go, so I say it’s a 5 out of 10, because we didn’t talk about Go’s future, we talked about communicating and building scientific evidence about why we need to change things in Go.

We talked about how we will influence the future of Go, and that there will be a future of Go.

Exactly, which again, is an incredibly valuable talk, but we totally got click baited on the title. “Ten people got together in a room and built Go 2.0. Click here to see what happens next!”

So one cool fact that – I’m gonna totally ignore Brian right now… [laughs]

This is new?

One cool fact that came out of that though was – I forget where the stat came from, but I know that they had estimated somewhere between 500,000 and a million Go programmers in the world, which seems astronomical at this point.

I can’t remember where the stats came from either, but you’re ignoring me, so I won’t answer anyway.

[laughs] So other talks…

Oh, you know who nailed one - Liz Rice.

Yes….

A Go Programmer’s Guide To Syscalls. That was so cool. Great talk.

She basically started the talk out talking about how in prior talks she mentioned system calls and she wanted to kind of make sure she knew what she was referring to when talking about them, so… She wrote a talk explaining how system calls work to people, and that’s actually really great if you’re not familiar with how system calls work. And a little bit of Linux Assembly too kind of really helps solidify that too; it talks about as far as resetting registers, and things like that.

[36:14] Yeah, Brian Downs in Slack said he could listen to Liz talk about anything, and I totally agree… This is maybe the third time I’ve seen her talk, and she just has such a fantastic delivery, she’s so eloquent, and she knows the materials so well. Between her and Jess Frazelle, I have 100% impostor syndrome when it comes to deep kernel-level knowledge of anything. Just “No, go ask them, because I don’t know.”

I was gonna say the same thing… I was going to say I haven’t seen her talk, but I don’t even care what it was about, because I’ve seen her talks before – the talk that she gave at Golang UK last year… She’s so great, I will watch anything she talks about.

Yeah, and if you didn’t see it, the talk that Carlisia’s referring to from Golang UK was she implemented containers in Go.

She did it live. It was very badass.

It was super cool, and I love that it makes the containers seem less magic. Because I think a lot of people see them as just kind of this – it’s kind of like a virtual machine; you don’t implement your own virtual machine, or virtualization software… But it kind of really breaks it down and you can kind of see the primitives of how cgroups and namespaces play into it, and how it’s really just a highly configured process.

Also on the deep technical end was Keith Randall; he came back and talked about SSA.

Oh, the SSA talk… That was a good one.

Yeah, which also, if you love Assembly…

Yeah, which, to be honest, I still don’t understand, but it was a great talk.

I was gonna say exactly the same thing… [laugh]

Hand wavy magic, something, something, compiler… Look!

Yeah, it’s one of those things, like – you don’t understand, but it makes sense. It’s amazing! It was a great talk.

It was a “temporary made sense”, though… As I was listening, I was like “Yeah, this makes sense”, but then an hour later it’s all gone.

Yeah, don’t ask me to explain it to you.

That’s okay. It was a great talk.

Any other favorites from the group?

Ashley McNamara’s talk… There wasn’t a single dry eye in the house… It was so good.

Oh, my god… I cried, and then –

Nobody succeeds alone.

The guy on my left - I was sitting between two guys - wasn’t crying, but the guy on my right was like lifting his glasses and wiping his tears. I’m like “Okay, I’m not the only one.”

Yeah, it just underscores to me how much the community matters in any project, in any enterprise, in any effort, and I think the Go community is really kickass. We have a great community that cares about each other, willing to do things to help, and Ashley’s talk really underscored how much that help can make a difference in your personal success and the success of your peers, and the success of the project itself. It was a touchy-feely, feel-good movie of the year. Good stuff.

Did anybody get to see Kris Nova’s talk?

I was going to say that… Oh my gosh, I’m saying this all the time. I was tied up with something and I missed her talk, and I haven’t had a chance to watch the video yet. That was on the top of my list of talks to watch.

Yeah, that one’s on my list as well. I felt bad, because I really wanted to try to sneak into that one, and then I can’t remember what happened and I realized I looked at my watch and I’m like “It was an hour ago.”

[39:51] One of the things that’s kind of amusing about that talk is that in conversations with random people over the last week or two, that talks specifically has come up several times. It was like, “You know, in Kris’s talk, blah-blah-blah-blah…”, so I think that one’s making its way around the internet much faster than usual. It’s kind of funny to hear them come back.

I’m trying to remember what other ones I saw… I did see a good portion of Mitchell Hashimoto’s talk on advanced testing, and I think there are some really good examples…

Oh, that talk was great.

Yeah, lots of good takeaways in that one.

I was really excited that – afterwards I talked to my co-workers and they were also excited about the fact that Vault has a test thing that you can use… As opposed to spinning up a Vault to test your stuff against, you can just have a virtual Vault; we learned that on that talk. But then it didn’t really work out well, because when you call it, you have to import a package, they import a bunch of other packages, and if you don’t mind that, it’s okay, but… They said that’s how it is, basically, so we chose not to use it. But it’s very cool. In any case, there are a bunch of gems in that talk, for sure.

And then Sam Boyer did a talk on The New Era Of Go Package Management. He was talking about the new Dep, a bit of the history, direction, and guessing – not guessing; guessing is the wrong word… But kind of like where they would like to see it go, as far as what it might look like if it were implemented into the Go tool.

Any other favorites anybody was able to make it to?

Joe Tsai’s talk about Forward Compatible Go Code. I learned a lot from that talk, because there are things that you can take away from the Go 1 guarantee that all of your code will be forward-compatible, and there are things that you should really deeply learn about it. I think his talk was probably one of the more deeply educational for me, because I learned so much about how implementations can change underneath and bite you in subtle ways, in a way that’s completely compatible with the Go 1 guarantee. Sometimes a guarantee isn’t a guarantee, and that was a really good talk.

Can I apologize to the speakers that hear this show and don’t hear their names mentioned? To be clear, Brian and Erik - they run the conference and they don’t have a chance to watch most of the talks… And I was planning to watch all the talks I could, but I got tied up doing a little thing and I missed most of the talks I wanted to watch, so that’s why we don’t have a bigger list to mention. But in any case, you can’t possibly watch all the talks.

Now I wanna mention that the talks are listed on the GopherCon repo - a repo called 2007 talks, and I wanted to say thank you to Daniela Petruzalek from Brazil. She was the scholarship recipient and she put together a readme with the links to everything you could possibly wish for: the room the talk was in, the speaker, the SlideDeck, the video, and if there was a source code, she puts a link to that, too. She has a listing for the main talks, and a different listing for all the Lightning Talks.

I’m sure it took a lot of time to put this together. It seems like a little thing, but it’s so handy. I’m on this page daily.

[43:54] Yeah, couldn’t agree more. She put way more effort into putting the talks into a nice, organized table, with links to everybody and all the things than I certainly would have so and one of the things that she mentioned in Slack was that Ashley’s talk inspired her to do that. This is a way that she had time to give back, and I am very grateful for it, for sure.

That reminded me of something else I wanted to say in today’s episode… People ask me, “So how did you get involved with these things?” because they look at me like, “I’m not nobody, but I’m doing a podcast, and I’m doing this, and I’m doing that…” - that’s exactly how you get to be in a position of doing something more relevant. You just start saying yes, you just start seeing something – you have to be looking, first of all, and then you see something that needs to be done and you do it. Then the next time you turn around, people ask you to do something and you say yes, and pretty soon you’re taking leadership initiatives. That’s how people get involved and start doing more relevant things in the community.

Start looking for opportunities to contribute and when people ask you to do something, say yes.

Yeah, just sort of take a chance. Before we end up wrapping up the two or moving on too far, I wanna mirror Carlisia’s statement, too. Specific talks mentioned on the episode today are in no manner scoring higher than others; they happen to be ones that we were able to attend or happen to be able to watch since we got home. A lot of the times – I actually don’t think I caught much of any talks well at the conference, only slipping in videos here or there.

Everybody did an outstanding job, all the talks were great, so definitely make your way through the whole list. We did a survey too, and all of the talks got amazing feedback, so you won’t be disappointed with any of them.

Well spoken.

Yeah.

So before we wrap up, I wanted to call out some other conferences too, in case you didn’t get your fix at GopherCon, or it wasn’t a big enough fix and you need more Go conferences…

More!

Golang UK is on the 16th. This episode may or may not air before then… I’ve gotta do the math in my head; but anybody who’s listening live, tickets are still available. Brian will be speaking there.

I am closing out the show, burning the place down!

[laughs] And then GothamGo is in October. They’ve announced their keynote speakers - Steve Francia, Alan Donovan, Carmen Andoh, Jon Bodner and Jessie Frazelle. I don’t think they’ve announced any of the other speakers, but I think the CFP might be over for that already.

DotGo in Paris is in November. It announced six of their speakers. Brian is also speaking there.

Burning that one down, too.

Francesc and JBD and Sameer are also some of the speakers they announced. Then GopherCon Brazil is in November, and the CFP is open for that, so if you’d like to speak at a conference, I’m sure they would love to see your proposal.

Yeah, and I know Steve Francia is going to be at that conference in Brazil. Jess Frazelle is also going to be there, I’m pretty sure. I think I saw that.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, it’s the second one. Last year it was really – from all the accounts I’ve heard, it was really well done. And it’s in Brazil, come on!

Yeah, it’s Brazil.

Talking about Brazil, are we done with the conference listing?

Sure. He could talk about it for hours, so anytime you wanna end, it’s great.

[47:57] I just want a quick shoutout to Chairô from Brazil who was at the conference and gave us all a very fancy bottle of wine. By no means I wanna encourage people to give us gifts (please don’t), I’m just saying because he did it, so I feel very compelled to say thank you on the air. He was thanking us for such a good show, but people, don’t do that. Seriously.

Yeah, don’t bring us gifts!

I think that adds to the impostor syndrome.

Yeah, I can’t possibly be worthy of somebody bringing a bottle of wine 10,000 miles.

Yeah, he did four, because Adam also got one. Now I feel like I need to do better. It’s such a pressure! People, don’t give us gifts. [laughs]

It’s all about pressure. Alright, I have to sign out; I’ve got a hard stop here in two minutes, because I am working for a company now… So thanks everybody for another show, and feel free to continue without me. GopherCon was amazing this year, and I just can’t say thank you enough to all the people who participated, all the people who came… So many people helped in small and big ways; all of my love. Thank you.

Bye, Brian.

Bye, Brian. I wanna thank everybody, too. Scott Mansfield is asking about open source shoutouts. I think today really is about the community. I think that everybody contributing and everybody in the Go contributors room helping people contribute, and everybody who contributes even outside of the conference itself - I think we can all collectively agree that today we shout out to the community… Unless Carlisia has a fun one to add.

No, absolutely I second what you said.

So I think with that I think we can wrap this show up. Hopefully, coming here in the future we’ll talk a little bit about some of these other conferences. Are you going to any of the other conferences? I know you go to Brazil, right?

I’d love to go to Brazil, that’s still up in the air. I don’t know, my work is really heavy now, and I don’t know if I can take the time off. We’ll see. And also, I don’t what I would – I mean, I’d have to talk, because that’s how Fastly would pay me to go, and I have nothing to talk about… Not that I know of. I can’t come up with anything.

That’s always the hard part, getting a content. Well, I can’t say that’s the hard part… Getting up in front of a bunch of strangers and talking is probably the hard part, but first you have to get past coming up with what you’re going to talk about.

Yeah, for me that’s the hardest part, coming up with something to talk about.

I struggle with that, too. I’d like to speak again at another conference, but I need to come up with some material that I wanna talk about… Preferably something I’m super passionate about; it makes it easier that way.

[51:00] But if any of us make it to some of these conferences - I know Brian’s gonna at least be at the two - we will chat a bit about our experiences there.

I guess that’s a wrap. Thanks, Carlisia… Brian’s already gone, so we can’t thank him. Thanks everybody for listening and everybody who made it to GopherCon. And even if you didn’t attend, all the companies contributing towards the diversity initiatives. This year was so amazing, and we’re so grateful to be a part of this community.

Yeah, it made a huge difference, thank you.

And as far as the podcast goes, if you’re enjoying it, please share with friends and colleagues. We are on Twitter, you can chat with us live in the Slack channel… I always forget the invite link for that.

You can always go to General, and at the top, the invite is right there.

No, I mean, for where it invites to sign you up, or you can sign yourself up. There’s the auto sign-up.

Yeah, invite.slack.golangbridge.org - that’s what I mean. If you wanna get that link, go to the general channel, and right at the top is one of the links to that.

Okay, so invite.slack.golangbridge.org to join the Slack. There’s also the Changelog Slack which links with it if you wanna chat with us, and especially in real time. With that, thanks everybody! We’ll see you next week!

Bye, thank you!

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