Last week I was at GopherCon UK 2019, my third Go-related conference.
(If you're here just for my sketchnotes, they are at the bottom)
Compared to last year, some things changed, and some things stayed the same:
- Sponsorship / Exhibitions changed from banking to tooling (IDE, static analysis, proxy, ...)
- Still three tracks, although the third track was more of a workshop track
- A bit more participants (the main presentation room had extra seats added)
- Again a very large group of first-time goers
- Cory LaNou, whom I talked with again this year, sees hardly a change in training business
Last year I wrote "Go is exploding", now I'd say it's spreading and settling. Though, it's still not that commonplace - this I mean in terms of talks. While there were a few that reported their usage, much was still focused on "how to do X" in Go. Another participant compared this to Python conferences, where it's more about what products were built and so forth.
It's still good to "invest" in Go-knowledge and I've come to terms with the general lack of a Go-related community here in Vienna, Austria. Side-note: During the last year, the Go meetup crumbled and only now in Autumn sees another attempt at meetings. Also during the past 12 months, I brought the team I work with to get interested in Go and attempt some small tools and prototypes. The taste is there - yet, by end of October I'll leave The Company and change for a consultancy-like employer. While they also have no Go "force", my hope is to be of an asset as soon as Go does become more common in Vienna.
As for the praised "community", my impression is that it has become anonymous and perhaps even detached. By that I mean the ratio between "known" people to the general Go-developer has turned so much that the "celebrities" have hardly any connection to most of the people. They don't have to, it just means that the general developer has no relationship to them, other than "that person on stage".
Slightly related, on Tuesday, the day before the workshop day, I tried to rally people via Twitter and the Slack channel to do a small informal meeting of lone-souls, like myself. Only Cory showed up - another person tried though they were tangled up in traveling troubles.
In short, the Go community has become so big that you can see the effects of the 90-9-1 rule. It might be that this has been the case for a longer period, at least the realization has reached me now ;) - after all, I also didn't do any pull request to the Go-core despite registering as a contributor last year.
The two talks that stood out the most for me are first the one about Go used for robotics (a fun one), showing how a drone can be controlled with a few nicely abstracted function calls; and second the talk from a cryptocurrency company that managed to implement fail-safe (crash-safe) handling of data (money) by applying a few, simple concepts. (compared to others who spend entire teams and years to do something similar...)
There was also the final keynote about the platform-independent UI library that stumped many. It has potential, yet I remain neutral/skeptical. Choosing the path of an immediate-mode GUI (A more detailed overview here) is a viable one, yet the showed examples felt like some sacrifices had to be done. Prime example: instead of the button function to return the triggered state, you have to poll a button instance separately. For reference, I am also the maintainer of the Go wrapper for "Dear ImGui", a very common immediate-mode GUI library for games. Using it for my level editor, I have some experience.
I am a bit skeptical because as long as this UI library remains a one-person project without active users, it's difficult to take off. That the project is hosted on a niche, unknown hosting platform doesn't help either.
Another developer I talked with was a bit frightened (albeit a bit in jest), because they left being a "full-stack developer" for Go to just focus on the server-side. Projects such as these have potential to open up Go for any purpose - which is cool.
For 2020 GopherCon EU is coming to Berlin, so, most likely I'll attend that one instead of the UK one.
Finally, here are my sketchnotes for most of the talks I was at, in no particular order.
They are released under a Creative Commons license (shown in image), so you may use them accordingly.
Semi-related: Last year at GopherCon UK 2018, one attendee asked me to make a time-lapse of such a drawing. Here is one example:
(Frames were taken using a special-built Go tool - of course ;)
