This is the first time attending a conference outside my country. It was pretty exciting and scary because I’m going alone but nonetheless it was an amazing experience.
I met a couple of interesting people and mostly I think it boosts more my confidence in traveling.
The first day was all about learning Go for Intermediate developers by William Kennedy.
I learned quite a lot, although I’ve been using Go in work for some time now, I admit that I still have a long way to go. The core that I have to learn more is how to effectively use interface. I was awed when he showed the tooling on profiling a Go code, I’m looking forward on his blog post diving deeper on these subject.
On the second day is where I got to see a lot of speakers, talked to some interesting people, and of course, I met one of the creators of Go Robert Griesemer.
If the abstraction is right, it’s worth paying its price. - Robert Griesemer
Personally, the talks that interest me are this:
- Escape Analysis and Memory Profiling - I saw this on the lecture and still very interesting to see again.
- Distributed Scheduler Hell - talk about the caveats of using new deployment platforms like mesos and kubernetes, and what are the things they are still not good at.
- TDD for those who don’t need it - A very nice talk, at first I would almost think this the speaker hates TDD, but he presented in a way that a lot of people can relate. Think of the test as a set of requirements, one small task at a time and getting things done.
- Native Go Development on GCP with the Context Package - this one was a short talk but gave a very brief overview of why
contextpackage is needed. - Distributed Tracing in Grab - Talk about opentracing and how useful it is when you have microservices, this is tied somehow with
context.
After the talk, there was an after party which is near the conference area. Lot’s of food and drinks, here I was able to talk with Robert, I’m surprised by how humble he is. We talk quite a lot, I even asked him what prompted them to develop go. I can’t exactly remember the exact word but he told me that Ken Thompson was trying to compile C++ code and he got frustrated, so Robert told him they have to fix it. That where it started, back in 2007. In the end, I asked him for some advice and he told me this book called Compiler Construction. Well I guess have some new stuff to read.
And mostly thanks to the organizers of GopherConSG, you guys did an absolutely amazing event.
Stay tuned for some post about these subjects.
Edit 1: Updated with links to include Youtube videos.