Kris Brandow: And actually, we do have a fifth member. We now have a producer and a reoccurring guest host. So a reoccurring guest host is the wonderful Johnny Boursiquot. He’s already guest-hosted an episode that will be shipping soon. The “What’s New in Go 1.24” episode with Carlana.

Carlana Johnson: And it’s like this slow and steady improvement thing. It’s really what’s fun about Go, is like watching how they set down markers of like “We’re not adding maps.keys. We’re gonna add iterators, we think, probably, maybe…” And then it happens. So it’s always exciting.

Natalie Pistunovich: You’ve been working with Ardan Labs since 2019, right?

Bill Kennedy: Yeah… So to me, that would be the role I would want after I’m done with Ardan. I think that would be so much fun.

Ronna Steinberg: I said Ardan Labs…

Natalie Pistunovich: Yeah, we’ve been zooming for two years now… Once the meetup is gonna go back to in-person, it’s just gonna be weird, at some point. Just as it was weird transitioning to Zoom, it’s gonna be weird transitioning, but we’ll manage.

So Ole, you are a backend engineer since the ‘90s. That’s your fun catchphrase. And you’ve been working in different companies that are big and small, and you’ve had lots of projects that you saw fail and succeed. And you love being part of the Go community, and you’re working for Ardan Labs… And hey, you’re my co-organizer at my Go user group… Since we were just trying to remember, as we were preparing for this call - we’ve said, what was it, 2017, 2018?

Natalie Pistunovich: Hello everyone, and welcome to an episode about books in Go. And I am joined today by two authors; Bill is a Managing Partner of Ardan Labs, and based in Miami, which is six hours away from me in Berlin. Bill is teaching Go and speaking about Go, and recently published the book “The Ultimate Go Notebook”. Hi, Bill.

Matt Holt: Yeah, good question. I think I would describe v2 as predominantly unrelated to the funding/sustainability stuff. v2 was a technical goal. And when it became clear we needed to sustain Caddy with some funding, we tried a couple things, like a sponsorship package, and what we called an engineering package, where you could gain access to Caddy expert engineering for your company… And with v1 that didn’t work out too well, because people largely saw Caddy v1 as a toy, which isn’t super-wrong… I mean, you could totally use it in production. It was built for production use, but maybe not like for enterprise use, and it didn’t have a lot of advanced features, so I think we missed out on that market.

Then we experimented with shipping custom binaries from our website, so I built this whole thing that generated a custom build of Caddy for you, click-click-click, download… And those binaries that you downloaded were licensed for non-commercial use, unless you paid, basically.

[36:26] So if you’re gonna use our build server, and take advantage of using Caddy in your company, we wanted to see if we can make that sustainable, since we knew a lot of companies were automating downloads from our website… And I don’t think it was that confusing, because a lot of software packages do stuff like this, where they’ll take an open source project and then either brand or license something else on top of it. You see this all the time… Chrome, for example, is a rebranding of Chromium. And there’s a ton of examples; the Java world has something like this, I think even VS Code…

Anyways, so Caddy has always been open source. It’s always been Apache-licensed, and it has never, ever changed, and it’s not going to. We experiment with shipping binaries from our website that were licensed differently for non-commercial use. That was actually more sustainable, probably because it kind of forced a lot of companies into paying for it… And that helped quite a bit, but it was very confusing to people.

So at some point, Bill Kennedy reached out to me, from Ardan Labs, and talked about kind of a partnership, some way to make Caddy more positively sustainable, commercially-viable. So Ardan funded the development for Caddy 2, for the most part, that first ten or so months. So I was able to drop the commercial licensing binaries and just revert everything back to simple open source. So that’s kind of where it’s at now; it’s purely an open source project, with no commercial licensing whatsoever. It’s sustained purely on sponsorships.

Bill Kennedy: [01:14:09.06] What I wanna do, Kris, when my time with Ardan is up, I would love to be hired as a coach, and every week work with a different team at some company, to improve the design philosophies and the engineering and what they’re doing. Not sit down and write the code, but to be pairing with them and teaching them.

I think this role is incredibly critical moving forward, but there’s a problem with this role. At the end of the year, when your performance review comes up, you’ve got nothing to show for it.

Carmen Andoh: Sure. So one of the things that we have a problem with in terms of strategy is we have a finite number of engineers on the Go team… And I always am hoping to tap into them to write blog posts about modules, or update documentation… I know Effective Go needs to be rewritten with modules in mind… There’s just a lot with regards to educating.

So we launched learn.go.dev, which was kind of a beta site curation that takes in and just helps organize some of the information… But at this point it’s pretty static, and it could be akin to the Wiki on GitHub for Go. So we realized pretty soon on, either Google has to hire a ton, dozens and dozens of content creators and tech writers to scale this for the next 10 million (or however many million), or we need to think about an open source strategy for this.

The other thing - when I researched the learning landscape of Go, I recognized that the current material that is existing that is produced by the Go team is static, and it’s text-heavy. We do have the Playground, and we do have the Go Tour, but that’s the extent in terms of being able to provide modalities of material.

So we rely largely on third-party people to either do training, so Ardan Labs or Gopher Guides, or we have people who are enterprising enough to create Gophercises, such as yourself, Jon.

[19:48] So the missing link, I feel, is that as both Paul and Marcos have alluded to, there was a big gap in what I call the interactivity and the ability to make documentation not stale, and have it come alive, so that people can try out what’s being meant by it… And it also is a change in – so we have a change in people for Go coming to the language; lots and lots of people. But we also have people that are a different kind of persona, which is mostly enterprise. And when you dig deeper into the persona of an enterprise or a person who uses Go professionally, they’re not similar to the early adopter.

The early adopter is curious, and they probably want to try out all the new languages, whereas the professional programmer using it at work - they just want to get the job done. They wanna see what it looks like, and they’re very practical and pragmatic, and they don’t wanna wax eloquent about the philosophy a bit, or the context a bit… They just wanna get it done.

So we’ve heard that we can call it as meat and potatoes, or beans and rice, but really to the heart of it… And I think that play-with-go.dev is that gap that fills for everything that’s happening with Go right now.

So a long-winded way, Jon, of saying “Yes, we’re looking at ways, with limited funds, to be able to scale out content that would be useful to a lot of people, but also get the ecosystem involved, and empower them…” Because some of the most useful materials that I’ve found is when people wanna share and teach. Everyone wants to feel useful. So I think this is a convergence of both strategy and product that is trying to meet all of those things at once… And I have a lot of hope and confidence that we’ll achieve that.

Yetunde Dada: Some of the more interesting names were – I think when there was no agreement on names. It consisted of names like Barano, [unintelligible 00:25:05.28] which is a plumbing company… And the list of five names that included Kedro in the end, that went for final legal verification, included Braze, which kind of worked, because it referred to welding, or stitching together pieces, which is what the pipeline does. We had Knittic as well, which is kind of also playing with that whole thing of knitting things together.

Bill Kennedy: Oh, rockstar – blah! Anyway, I found my way to Go back in 2013. I own a company named Ardan Labs with my best friend, brother, and business partner, Ed Gonzales down in Miami. In 2013 we had to switch off of Windows and move into a Linux environment. I was coding a lot of C# at that time, and that’s when we found Go, and I started writing some blogs, and Erik and Brian, the other hosts on the show, invited me to join them in writing the “Go in Action” book, and that led to talking at the very first GopherCon.

Then between the blog and the book, I started developing training material, and probably started training at the end of 2015, and now it’s pretty much a full-time job, day in and day out, and I still make it a point to write one blog post every month on the GoingGo.net blog, which we’ve now moved over to Ardan Labs, but everything gets redirected. So I’m really just a software developer who’s been writing software professionally since 1991, and I’ve been working in Go for almost five years.

Erik St. Martin: Oh, wow… So huge thank you to all of our listeners and to our sponsors, Backtrace and Ardan Labs’ Ultimate Go Series. Definitely share this show with friends and co-workers who you think might be interested. You can subscribe by going to GoTime.fm. Follow us on Twitter, we are @GoTimeFM and if you wanna be on the show or have suggestions for guests on the show, topics etc. github.com/GoTimeFM/ping. With that, goodbye everybody, we’ll see you next week!

Erik St. Martin: Well, huge thank you to everybody on the show, thanks to all the listeners listening right now. Huge shoutout to our sponsors, StackImpact and Ardan Labs. If you haven’t checked them out, please do. We will put links in the show notes. Definitely share this show with friends and colleagues. An easy way to subscribe is to go to GoTime.FM. We will have a weekly email coming out shortly, so go ahead and get signed up to that. We are @GoTimeFM on Twitter, we have a GoTimeFM channel in the Gophers Slack. If you wanna be on the show or have suggestions for topics or guests for the show, github.com/GoTimeFM/ping. With that, goodbye everybody! We’ll see you next week. Mat Ryer will be joining us for next week’s show.

Erik St. Martin: So this is funny, this is kind of sidelining here… But somebody made a comment about needing a barbecue Gopher. They were like, “We should totally see whether the Ardan guys will create one for us.” And there, apparently, already exists one. There is already a gopher standing at the grill, or - I forget what it looks like now.