So I recently was at GopherCon UK 2018. My second GopherCon, with the first one being GopherCon IS 2018, just a few weeks before.
(If you're here just for my sketchnotes, they are at the bottom)
There's no point in comparing the two conferences, with the one in Iceland being the first "EU" one (Brexit aside), while the one in the UK had several precursors. Still, you see where the money's at.
A few quick facts that I gathered while being there:
- A handful of sponsors, majority of which (that had a booth) in money business
- Three tracks
- Around 500 participants (called "delegates" there)
- About 80% of which were on their first GopherCon
- When asked before a keynote how many were looking for a Go job, only two (!) raised their hands
- Cory LaNou, one of the workshop trainers, told me there are hardly any other (global) Go trainers besides him and his team of three
- Cory also told me that they are full with bookings for trainings, including from big companies that not only want trainings for just one team, but several
Just by these non-scientific measures, I truly believe that Go is now exploding - it's reaching corporate levels and a huge influx of Go developers.
"It's a good situation to be in," commented one of the MCs about the two job-seeker (sorry, I forgot which one said that, might have been Mat Ryer). Yet I also believe that this is the stress test for "the community", which was praised on several occasions and talks.
Personally I genuinely believe "the community" to be great, what I'm not sure about is whether their traits (style, culture) can be broadcast and become adopted with this sort of growth. That's assuming you can extrapolate the scale of industrial use by the numbers of newcomers to the conference.
As a semi-related thought: I've came across a few comments similar to "This is how it is implemented in the standard library, so try to follow this style." To a certain degree I'm willing to listen, then again, I'm also not planning to read a lot "down" there. Although I've been with Go for private projects since around Go 1.3, I see myself more of a user of the language, not a core contributor (yet), who lived through the language's growth during the past years. So, whatever I "should" be adopting ought to be in a style-guide. Note that this is the same language that has its one-and-only source code format.
A side-side note: The absence of a continuing guide beyond the online tour was pointed out (by "Roberto", though I'm bad with names, and sorry)
Still, the community talks were the ones I joined, including the contributor workshop where you get to do your first (sandbox) commit - I feel like a special snowflake now. I am very willing to contribute to "the community", and this not just because of the talks, they were more of a confirmation for me that this language (and community) is where to be for the next years [for the scope it is ideally applicable for].
This is also where it gets tricky. My private project (a graphical level editor for the old video game "System Shock") feels rather on the exotic fringes of typical Go applications. I have been encouraged to write some blog posts about it, so that's another contribution plan for me now.
And at The Company, Go is far from being used on a broad basis. Trying to get at least my team use Go is a plan measured in months and years.
So, will I keep Go mainly as my private (hobby) language, possibly contributing, or can I make it part of my professional life (and free up some private time)?
Life choices.
No, I was not one that raised their hand for the job question - yet I thought about doing so. For comparison: The Go Meetup group here in Vienna has mostly visitors that confirm using Go for private projects and seeking employment themselves.
I definitely want to visit at least one of the two conferences around Europe next year again.
Here are my sketchnotes for almost all of the talks/keynotes I was at. No particular order, hopefully in the order I visited them :P
They are released under a Creative Commons license, so you may use them accordingly.
