32. GopherCon 2019 Spotlight, Part 1

Chris Castle recently attended GopherCon 2019 in San Diego, and captured small conversations from many different Go community members. In Part One of a two-part episode, he had several conversations with GopherCon speakers about what they were building.

Nick Gerakines is the Director of Software Engineering at Mattel, the toy company. Mattel has several toys with Internet connectivity, and Go is the primary language used for all of their connected products, whether it's to support authentication and parental controls, or providing product catalog and product instance information. A lot of core gameplay mechanics, such as the number of "miles" a car has ridden on a track, are also transmitted and reported through Go services.

Robert Ross works at FireHydrant. They're using Go for their Kubernetes integration and internal developer tools for local development. For example, they are able to build Docker Compose files on the fly. His favorite aspect about the language is that it can build a portable (and performant!) binary with very few lines of code.

Jessica Lucci is an infrastructure engineer at GitHub. Her interest in Go is catered towards establishing some standardizations beyond simple code formatting. For example, with the recent introduction of Go modules, devising a system around versioning third-party libraries is an interesting problem, particularly when it comes to pinning versions for consistency or updating versions in the event of a CVE.

Tim Raymond works for Gopher Guides, and conducted a training session on testing your Go code. His favorite aspect of GopherCon is its community, where new and old friends meet to share their interests.

Jay McGavren is the author of Head First Go, a programming book designed to teach programmers about how to be effective with Go. It will take Go beginners from basic language features all the way to coding a simple web app.

Carolyn Van Slyck works for Microsoft, and she's used Go to design her perfect CLI. By focusing on the developer experience, she was not only able to abstract away some of the harder tasks which a user might rely upon piping several commands together into one, but she also isolated some of the CLI-specific aspects, such as argument parsing, for future developers to feel more confident when contributing to the project.

Links from this episode

The Mattel Hot Wheels id toy is powered by Go services
Modules are a newer system of dependency management for Go
Head First Go is a programming tutorial for Go, written by Jay McGavren and published by O'Reilly Media
Gopher Guides leads Go workshops for interested individuals
Jessica Lucci's talk, "You Can't Go Your Own Way"
Tim Raymond's lightning talk, "Parsing Expression Grammar"
Jay McGavren's talk, "Teaching Tech", on effectively teaching programming
Carolyn Van Slyck's talk, "Design Command-Line Tools People Love"