We went to dotGo 2016
My team member, Dániel Kalmár and I were lucky enough to attend the biggest European Go conference a few weeks ago. The conference took place in the Théâtre de Paris, as part of the dotConferences series. Since we have been using Go as our primary tool for almost two years now, we were quite excited to meet with the community.
It was a one-day conference, with workshops before and after. We only attended the presentations, so we had time to explore Paris. I don’t want to waste too much time convincing anyone how great Paris is and how much fun you can have there, so let’s jump into the techie part.
Personally, I very much enjoyed how the program was orchestrated. It was a great mix of different topics and levels of knowledge to keep the attention of all attendees. Since the whole event happened in one place, we didn’t have to juggle our time. There were two different kinds of presentations, the common 30-40 minute tech talks and the 10 minute maximum lightning talks. The lightning talks were a great opportunity to showcase small projects or just gain some experience on the stage. I believe every presentation will be uploaded to youtube, so if you couldn’t make it to the conference, you will still be able to enjoy part of the experience.
There was an exceptional speaker list this year. Robert Griesemer, the co-creator of the Go project, talked about how to create a feature requests for the language and how to build a prototype for it. Kelsey Hightower from Google did a great demo about self deploying Go applications, relying on Kubernetes. Dave Cheney presented an interesting pattern to manage configurations for Go programs, leveraging on anonymous functions. Péter Szilágyi talked about the Ethereum project, which is getting bigger and bigger buzz with digital currency fans. It was also great to have some less technology oriented talks, like Katrina Owen’s about refactoring.
My personal favourite was Brad Rydzewski’s presentation about his personal project, Drone CI, which is a continuous integration tool. The interesting thing about this project is that you can define your own environment for every CI job, so developers are not tied to a specific technology when it comes to writing new plugins or integrations.
I always enjoy listening to people talking about their hobbies and pet projects, and the conference was a great platform for that. Besides the wide spectrum of technical knowledge that we can benefit from in our daily job, these events provide a great opportunity to fill up your tank with extra motivation and inspiration.
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