GopherCon was back in San Diego this year! As such, I was able to attend yet again. The conference was well worth attending and I had a great time. There were some great talks, a rather unusual workshop, and even some interesting sponsors/exhibitors. Here are some of my highlights!

Workshop: Intro to Rust #

Why go to a Rust workshop at a Go programming conference? Good question. I believe it is valuable to explore other programming languages to gain experience with different approaches to software development. Rust is often compared to Go, albeit unfairly so. Go is heavily focused on microservices and ease of use for developers. Rust is more focused on memory safety, replacing C++, and blazing fast speeds. A developer can learn Go and deploy code to production in a week, but Rust has an infamously high learning curve. Along with this high learning curve comes a wealth of different features and the incredible claim of no memory leaks.

Another year and another GopherCon, this time in sunny San Diego! As usual, there were a lot of high quality talks across a breadth of subjects. I highly recommend browsing through the GopherCon videos on YouTube, but I’ll highlight what I thought were the interesting bits below.

The last year or so has seen a LOT of discussion around dependency management for Go, particularly around dep and Go Modules (formerly vgo). Previously, dep was the “official experiment” for dependency management for Go, but was superceded by a proof of concept called vgo that became what we now know as Go Modules. Go Modules is being actively developed in the Go toolchain and is the future of dependency management for Go. While dep is a fine choice, it’s clear that the Go team will be pushing Go Modules hard. This was made clear in Russ Cox’s introductory talk regarding the future of Go 2.0. I’ve always been more in the dep camp, but a lot of my concerns were alleviated by what I heard from Russ. Also, there was a fantastic talk later on by Aaron Schlesinger about Athens, a free, open source mirror for Go Modules. It seems to me that Go Modules will be in a good place to take over dependency management for Go in the near future.

I had the privilege again this year to fly out to Denver and attend GopherCon, the premier gathering of “gophers” (people who program in Go). It’s a lot of fun and I learn something every time. After spending the weekend hanging out around town with my wife, enjoying Hammond’s candy and exploring the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I started the conference with a machine learning workshop. It turned out to not be quite what I expected. I was hoping to spend more time with deep neural networks and current tools of the trade, like Tensorflow. Instead we spent most of our time going over machine learning basics, which I was already marginally familiar with. They did go over the math behind a few concepts, like linear regression and k-nearest neighbors. I found that to be interesting enough. Afterwards, they started setting up some arcade classics that could be played for free, so I knew the conference was going to good.