Ronna Steinberg: So a funny story… Natalie organizes GopherCon Europe, and year one of GopherCon Europe, which was in Iceland…

Mat Ryer: One of the nice things about GopherCon EU is that it moves around as well. So we had one in Iceland, we had one in Tenerife, and now Berlin… So it’s great, you get to visit these places that you would otherwise maybe not go to.

Jeff Sheldon: Yeah, that was a point-and-shoot camera in Iceland, and that video blew up. That was probably the most watched video I ever made.

Natalie Pistunovich: There was one in Iceland, in Reykjavik.

David Yakobovitch: Sure. So human-centered AI as a term just became big in the market in the last year. It became big because Stanford said “We’re gonna launch the HAI Institute”, their own human-centered AI institute with Fei-Fei Li, who’s been a professor at Stanford for many years, and ran Google Labs for a few years as well… And the intention is really thinking about the future, because Stanford, and even other major institutions like MIT with CSAIL are thinking about “What is gonna happen when technology is everywhere?” The elimination is already happening with jobs, and it’s not just in the U.S.

I recently had a colleague traveling in Shenzhen, China, and they stayed at the J.W. Marriott, a premium, ultra-luxury hotel, part of the Marriott Bonvoy brand. And when at the hotel, that individual wanted to get room service. What did the J.W. Marriott do there? Now they have robotic butlers that drop off the latest diet Coke that you like, or your meal. They no longer have humans going from rooms. Those robotic butlers have computer vision, they can press the elevator button, go in, ring your doorbell, drop the food off, and they don’t have to wait… So it provides greater access for on-demand service, 24/7.

I mention that because that’s why I think Stanford and MIT and other institutions have moved in on this human-centered AI movement, where – look, we’re moving to AI; we all get it, that is the future. And sure, there’s some hype; it’s gonna be slower and faster in certain segments than we think or expect. But if we don’t start placing diverse opinions into these processes early on, thinking about bias and how we can make sure the systems work for all people, then we’re gonna slip behind.

So by thinking about that, you can say “When I design the process, does it work for someone who’s 75 years old AND someone who’s 7 year old? Am I designing a process that can move in different terrains? Is the product going to be one that works across multiple languages?” Anything that is non-accessible needs to be accessible with AI. The reason is because otherwise you’re excluding different cultures.

Today we serve all cultures, primarily by hiring people who speak different languages. If you travel to Disney World or Disneyland, you get that. They have hundreds of fantastic park service individuals who speak different languages and support you as tour guides throughout your journey. But in the future, that could just be a soundpiece with different languages.

The challenge is we have to make sure we’re being accessible for all, and starting to design technology that’s enabling humans at the onset. One example that’s been a failure, that has been quite prominent in the news, is how Apple with Siri - their audio-enabled assistant - never had an Icelandic language for Iceland. So when you were a kid - now as alpha generation, or generation Z, growing up, you were using Siri, the human language of English, to communicate with Siri. So you’re speaking in English, but not Icelandic, because Icelandic didn’t exist for Siri. And what that meant is they’ve shown now that the Icelandic language is becoming extinct in Iceland… Because kids do not wanna learn it, and therefore parents are not gonna teach it, and before you know it, we’re having the diaspora of culture appearing again as a result of technology.

I like to think back to one of my favorite authors, Jared Diamond. He’s written “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, “Collapse”…

Mark Bates: Oh, you’re always safe with us, you know that… Although I think I made you pee once on a bus trip in Iceland, which I do apologize…

Steve Francia: [07:57] Yeah, crazy to think. I’m excited for Go Europe, which is in Iceland; it’s coming up in I think three or four weeks now. I know this week is Go Singapore… There’s just a lot of conferences happening, and it’s so much that it’s hard to keep up with them all.

Cassandra Salisbury: I am. I honestly will probably be at a lot of the conferences this year… Not necessarily speaking, but primarily because I want to get to know the communities in the different parts of the world, so that I can better advise of how we should support them. If you’re not kind of there on the ground, it’s difficult to gauge that effectively. But I will absolutely be at India with the State of Go talk. I wish I could have gone to Russia, but I won’t be able to make it.

If I go down the list, there’s GopherCon China, there’s GothamGo, there’s GopherCon Singapore, there’s GopherCon Europe in Iceland, which there will be a special announcement about soon… GopherCon Brazil, which I will try to actually get to this year, GoLab, the one you were talking about, in Italy… Tokyo, then Denver, there will be a West Cost Gopherfest, and it will be more of a full conference… I’m actually working with [unintelligible 00:46:30.14] who do GothamGo, and we’re working on kind of a better West Coast conference maybe around more specific topics, and then in 2019 there will be another DotGo. So there’s a lot… It’s awesome!

It’s really amazing to see how many conferences there have been added. Even in just the last few months I’ve added four that have just suddenly popped up. So it’s really rad, and a lot of them still have open CFP’s, and you can find that on the wiki as well. I encourage everyone to look at those and just submit or start to write CFP’s. I’ve opened up my services to help people craft and develop CFP’s, and then there’s so many resources on that New Speakers page as well.

Vitor De Mario: Yeah, I wanna be one of the people sending a proposal to you as well, and to GopherCon in Iceland and in other places too, but I haven’t yet.

Amal Hussein: Thank you. Yes, I’m - yeah, I just came back from Iceland… I’ve been in the United States for less than 24 hours…

Paul Orlando: He was basically looking – or somebody was looking at what would happen when a country or a city would change the side of the road that people drove on. So this happened famously in Sweden in the ‘60s, and Iceland… A number of different places went from driving on one side of the road to the other. So you would just think, “That’s gotta be like complete chaos. Everybody is doing a mirror image of what they used to do…” And then the actual natural experiment that unfolded was - well, the place became safer for a while, because everybody is so careful about driving around. “Well, I’ve gotta make sure that I turn in a different way now, and I’m watching for traffic from a different direction.”

There was a traffic engineer - Monderman I think was his name - who was designing road systems where there would be no signs at all. So the only inputs are –

Erik St. Martin: I agree. I think part of my love isn’t just the language, it’s the community… Just too much fun. And the conferences, too. I can’t even keep up with the number of conferences that keep popping up. I’m actually really sad I’m gonna miss some of them. And they’re in really cool vacationy areas too, like Iceland, and Brazil…

Danny Thompson: Yeah. I learned how to code at 30. I’m about to be 36. So I would go to this meetup and I instantly realized that I don’t know anything. And people are like speaking a foreign language to me. They’ll talking about Java, C#, and C… I don’t know any of the stuff in that, but I kind of felt like I was excluded from the overall conversation happening, because I didn’t have anything I could contribute, I didn’t know what they were talking about… But in that moment, I basically said to myself that I’m never going to be excluded from a conversation again. And I just went home and I just started studying, I started building, I started getting further, further in depth with the subjects… And that’s when my technical breadth started growing.

And over time, people in those communities James Q. Quick, one prime example - they started seeing how I was progressing. And so a lot of the peers started becoming recommenders. And over time - and this is kind of why I say communities are so great… You have the same people kind of returning. And so when they see you progress over month one, month six, month nine, and they start seeing you grow and your technical skillset growing, they’re going to be more excited to recommend you for stuff.

[00:07:55.04] And so that was like my pivotal moment to start getting more connections, and conversations… And then from there, I started building my own group, and I built a group that was tremendous in the Memphis area called GDG Memphis… From there, I was helping groups in North Carolina, I was helping groups in California, and I was even helping groups in the Florida area, trying to build up events… Because a lot of them kept saying “We can’t really tap into the community.” You make a few adjustments here and there and next thing they’re starting to not just get people coming to an event, but returning to an event. And to me, I think that’s the biggest tell. It’s already a battle to get them to come there. But if you’re not getting them to come back and have a good time, there’s a big disconnect.

And so from there, I started helping people, I helped out a group in Saudi Arabia, I helped out groups in Ireland… I literally helped out a Mongo group in Ireland, so that was pretty cool… And then over time it just kind of grew to where – I think I’ve helped groups in like nine countries. And so they’ve all just kind of blossomed and grown.

Matthew Boyle: Ideally, it’s in seconds… But it has definitely shown up for us in minutes before. It’s basically the difference between – if you have a primary database, like a primary Postgres database… Let’s say it’s running in one AWS in London, and you have a secondary in Ireland. Like, what’s the difference between your writing to the Postgres database in London and it showing up in the Ireland database? And that’s the one you’re actually using for your reads. That’s what we’re measuring. And it’s a really common pattern that I’m sure we’ve all used, where we write to the primary and we read from the secondaries to remove some load from the primary, the writer. And if you’re not measuring that, then chances are you are seeing – you could potentially be seeing this replication issue where your customers are being served potentially stale data… And depending on your use case, your business case, that could be a big problem. But it’s going to be really, really hard for you to debug, and it’s going to be really, really hard for you – it’s not gonna show up on any of your error dashboards or anything like that, unless you’re tracking that specific metric.

And I think the more you dig into distributed systems, depending on what your stack looks like, you’ll find a bunch of different metrics and things like that that are like “Oh, that looks weird. Maybe we should be tracking that one.” It was having customer impact, but we didn’t necessarily know it was.

So these aren’t Go-specific issues. Whatever migration you go from, and when we start to move into a more distributed world, you’re going to start to see some of these things. And these are super-interesting problems, I love them, but they are much harder than dealing with a monolithic application with a single Postgres instance. That’s the ultimate place to be as a small team, in my opinion.

Daniel Ehrenberg: We try. I mean, everything’s open on GitHub for people to comment. And people who maintain proposals, who are championing proposals definitely read those comments, and respond to them. Maybe sometimes it takes them a while, but generally, people take that seriously.

Also, a lot of us go to conferences to speak about proposals, or just to learn from different developers… I just came back from – well, I saw you at NodeConf EU. That was great. In Ireland.

Laura Kalbag: It was my first time going. I’d never been, even though I live literally a five-minute drive away, I’d never been to the hotel that it was in, which is really the fanciest hotel I’ve ever been to in Ireland. It’s this really nice spa hotel, with these beautiful grounds… They have falcons, and things like that flying around.

Matteo Collina: Let’s plan for one in Ireland.

Luca Maraschi: Yeah, I also started very early coding… I still remember the first time… But I come from a family of entrepreneurs, and so I blended my passion for computers with the passion for building businesses and making impactful progress. I started when I was very young, at 12 years old, and I built along the way a few companies that I was able to sell… And I went through this cycle of learning something new and applying to business.

[00:07:57.06] In 2014, something like that, I met Matteo. Or ’15. I met Matteo in the backstage of Node Summit. And yeah, basically, in 2016, I was in front of a big decision to switch from moving to a large company or joining NearForm. And I still remember Cian in the castle, in Ireland, convincing me to join the NearForm. So it took just a few months and I joined NearForm, mostly because I was excited to work with people like Matteo. I had a very close friend, Dave, at the time, Peter… So I was very excited about all these people as well; it was a great opportunity.

So Matteo and I started traveling a little bit around the world for a couple of years, and in 2017 I moved to Canada. Well, not I moved to Canada, sorry. I visited Canada and then I decided to stay in Canada, where I moved in.

Audience Member: So this question is a lot less technical than the others… I read an article earlier and it basically said that the next top five sites for fintech locations will be London, Singapore, Belfast, New York and Dublin. As a local guy myself, in Ireland, I thought it was flattering that Belfast and Dublin got the mention, but I’m skeptical about who had done that research and whether they were from Ireland themselves… What I wanted to ask is, considering Brexit and the implications that could be coming up, luckily for all of us here London is number one… But if you were not able to be present in London and program here, whereabouts in the world would you go to be a Go developer?

CJ Silverio: Yeah, it looks like either I, or Chris Dickinson and I together will be at NodeConf EU in Ireland this November to talk. We’ll probably do a deep dive into what’s going on technically with the API and the data model, and that’ll be a lot of fun. We may even have some answers on the security side by that point.

So that’ll be fun… Go to Ireland, be at a beautiful resort in Ireland and talk Node. Or you could come join us in our Discourse, at our Discord; all of the disses. You can find all of these things if you go to our GitHub, which is github.com/entropic-dev, and there’s only one project in there… Well, actually there are two projects in there now. Kat is making projects. Find us there, and we have pointers there to our Discourse and our Discord, as well as the code. The code is the least important thing right now. Come join with us and talk with us… Because we’re in the talking phase.

Alex Ellis: You know, there’s so many people that it would almost be unfair, but I wanna say a big thank you to Richard Gee, that’s helped me out right from the beginning, to John McCabe over in Ireland, Ed Wilde, Burton Rheutan, Lucas Roesler, and all of the other people in the community that have been there for me and have been there for the project, and have helped to make it what it is.

Coby Chapple: Sure, so my name is Coby Chapple. I hail from New Zealand originally, but I also lived in Australia for a long time too, before moving to the U.K. I’ve lived around a few places in the U.K., I’ve lived in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and now I live in London.

Adam Stacoviak: Okay. So it’s cows that graze grass only, in the fields of Ireland… Then cows make butter.

David Flanagan: Well, I’m not speaking at it, so it just slipped my mind. But yeah, I’m organizing KubeHuddle. This is a very community-focused Kubernetes conference in Scotland. It’s October 3rd and 4th in Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh International Conference Center. So I’m really excited… We’ve got 28 speakers coming to share their knowledge. When I started planning it, I only really had one idea. I mean, it started with a tweet; let’s just get it out there. I tweeted “There should be a Kubernetes conference that’s community-focused in the U.K.” And then literally, three days later I had a venue. I was like, “Crap, this is happening.” So I had to learn how to organize a conference. It’s been really hard, but I’m really excited and really happy with what we’ve delivered.

[01:02:28.02] My main idea to start with - it has to be a two-track conference, because I want this conference to 1) have a track that caters to people that have never seen Kubernetes before. I think that’s really important, and I had to remember, even though it’s not my own personal content that I want to see, but 80% of our community – arbitrary number that I’m throwing out there, but 80% of our community is new to Kubernetes. We’re still very early in that adoption cycle.

But the other track was going to cater to the other 20%. So these are talks that are advanced, or at least intermediate towards advanced… Because I wanna be able to attract Kubernetes contributors. In the UK and Ireland and Europe there are a lot of people that are working on Kubernetes daily… And I don’t think that other Kubernetes conferences are a great place for them to go and share ideas, because they’re so big that they always cater for the 80%. So we have a track dedicated to these hard things as well, and… I’m really lucky, we do have a lot of Kubernetes contributors coming, and I’m looking forward to be able to give them a venue and a place where they can sit and share ideas about what’s next for Kubernetes and how do we drive the project even more forward. Because it’s fast-paced, and changes are happening, and I think we need to provide the forum to speed up those discussions.

So I’m very excited. It’s gonna be great. And you’re presenting as well… So I’m really looking forward to seeing you in-person again, and again, to say hello. And we have a lot of other great speakers.

Natalie Pistunovich: Looking at some of the conference agendas this year, I didn’t see too many talks about the topic of AI, so I think maybe this year we’re kind of – I don’t know, maybe the current open call for papers like for GoLab in Italy, and Brazil GopherCon, and the Ireland GopherCon, I think these are the ones that are still open, so maybe there we’ll get to see some talks about AI… But I know that in the European, in the UK, and in the - I’m assuming also the not yet announced US GopherCons I didn’t see too much about that. So I guess we’re all still processing it, but I’m definitely sure that next year we’ll have a similar talk, but it will be more AI-heavy… And I hope you will join as well then. So thanks, everyone.

Richard Littauer: In the past two months I’ve worked from Reykjavík, Ireland, Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Highlands, London, Berlin, San Francisco and Brussels.
[11:51] My favorite is Edinburgh, I went to uni there. That’s my home. I did work on the bus from Reykjavík airport into Reykjavík itself; that was really fun. Watson, with whom I basically sort of run ArcticJS, which happens every two years in Svalbard, in the North of Norway.

Austin Parker: Yeah, DesertedIsland.Club, or on YouTube, Deserted Island DevOps. Everything should still be up there. But yeah, we ran the last one a couple of years ago, and it was very fun. It was an inversion where because people were traveling again, we found an island in Michigan called Mackinac Island, that had a hotel on it, and an event space. And so all the speakers came in, and the speakers were all in the same place, and then we still livestreamed the Switch, but people were all in the same room together… It was a nice way to kind of put a bow on that little experiment.

Jerod Santo: That’s right. So I definitely saw value in it early on, because I was a consumer, that a lot of people didn’t see. And Adam, my partner, had a really hard time getting other people to see the vision that he saw of how valuable this could be for people… But I saw it, because I was one of those people who was like - I loved listening and hearing the lives of software developers, their decision-making processes, what they invest their time in… And then also just keeping up with new tools and techniques as a developer who was really out on an island in Nebraska, working by myself for small clients… I felt very much out on my own. It really made me feel connected to a larger community, and so I decided to invest in small ways over time.

[00:36:16.27] And I could see some value that I guess other people couldn’t see. Adam saw it, obviously… And I guess that proved out to be good, because over time it’s grown and grown, and eventually he began to go full-time, and then eventually I began to go full-time as we scaled down my consulting business. So yeah, it’s gone really well, it’s been kind of organic and slow and steady; that’s one of our monikers. But we enjoy it, and thankfully, other folks seem to enjoy it as well.

Ron Perris: And then we had another one – we hosted them on different Hawaiian islands, so I think the last one was on Oahu, and we’ve had them on Kauai, on the big island in the past. And the idea is just to get together with the small number of folks out there who are interested in this topic, and have a lot of sessions where we could share like best practices. It’s a single-track conference, which is cool, because then there’s no hallway track. We’re all kind of like locked into the same content, so it better be good.

Debbie O’Brien: Sure. So Majorca is a very small island. If you’ve heard of Barcelona in Spain, you just go across the water… Many people have heard of Ibiza. Ibiza is a smaller island of the Balearic Islands… So I could basically cycle around the island in a day; it’d be a good couple of hundred kilometers, but I’ve done it.

Yeah, so before Microsoft, I was working a lot with open source. I worked at a company previously called Bit. It’s a company about components. And before that I was working at Nuxt. You might have heard of Nuxt, as in the meta framework on top of Vue. And then before that, I was working at agencies and other small companies here on the island of Majorca, mainly in the hotel industry, because that’s what this island has, right? It’s all tourism.

So yeah, it was a lot of fun… Very involved in the frontend… When I worked at the agencies, for example, my mission was to create really good websites for hotel chains, and try and make sure there was great performance, add testing, teach their developers how to have better code… So I was constantly fighting for developers to do testing, right? And then I always had like managers saying, “No, we have no money. Why not just remove the testing and we’ll sell it at this price, and we don’t need to do testing?” And I’m like “Arrghh…!” So yeah, very frustrating. So it’s nice to actually work now in Playwright and enforce testing on the world… [laughs]