Being a member of the Go team allowed me to attend my first GopherCon in Denver from July 13 to July 15. This is the 4th GopherCon to be held and previously I’ve only watched the recordings of the sessions on the Gopher Academy Youtube Channel.
Although GopherCon has grown in size each year, it is still a relatively small conference compared other conferences that I’ve attended. This is a more social conference that gave off a vibe that felt similiar to smaller anime conventions. There was a lot of time alloted for people to hangout, talk and share in their mutual love of Go.
The attendees were fairly diverse and weren’t all hard core coders and the keynotes and tech talks reflected that. The various talks seemed to take the extra step of making the content accessible for everyone whether they had a strong technical background or not. There was a lot of emphasis on the community that I’ve not see as much in other tech conferences.
This was a well run conference with a good talks that I would recommend people to watch once they’re uploaded. I couldn’t attend all the talks, but these are the ones that I did attend and enjoyed:
- Generating Better Machine Code with SSA by Keith Randall
- Forward Compatible Go Code by Joe Tsai
- Writing a Go Tool to Parse and Modify Struct Tags by Fatih Arslan
- A Go Programmer’s Guide to Syscalls by Liz Rice
Although the topics could easily lead to very technical presentation requiring the attendees to have already have advance knowledge of the topics, each of the speakers were able to deliver the content in a way that I believe even fairly new developers can get something out of them.
Next year’s conference will be from Aug. 27 - Aug. 30 in Denver.
