GopherCon 2015: Favorite talks
Summary
This year’s GopherCon in Denver was a fantastic gathering, showcasing the vibrant community and solidifying Go's role in infrastructure with major sponsors like Docker and Kubernetes. My top three talks included Rick Hudson's engaging session on Go 1.5's improved garbage collector, Dmitry Vyukov's insights into Go's powerful dynamic tools like the race detector and execution tracer, and Audrey Lim's inspiring journey from law to programming, offering valuable observations about language impact on thinking and project choices. Robert Griesemer's keynote emphasized the blend of European and North American influences in Go’s heritage, while Tomás Senart delivered the conference's best joke.
GopherCon was in Denver again this year, and a lot of fun it was, mostly the meeting of wonderful people. Judging by the sponsors, Go continues to be the language of infrastructure (docker, coreos, etcd, mesos, kubernetes, influxdb, etc). Here are my three favorite talks:
- Rick Hudson: Go GC: Latency problem solved. This was probably the highlight of the conference for me. Rick is a fun speaker, and he’s talking about the key feature in Go 1.5. The garbage collector used to freeze your application for increasingly large amounts of time as you used more memory. It no longer does.
- Dmitry Vyukov: Go Dynamic Tools. Dmitry covers three tools: The race detector, go-fuzz, and the new execution tracer. The Go tooling is amazing.
- Audrey Lim: A Beginner’s Mind. Audrey is a lawyer who became a programmer recently, and she recounts her journey – but wait, read on. I confess when her talk was announced I thought I would not find it interesting. I was very wrong, because Audrey is phenomenal. She tried Python, Ruby and Node JS first, and detailed exactly why those were hard for a complete beginner. She made some very astute observations about how the language you use shapes how you think about programming, and the projects you will undertake.
Here are all the other GopherCon 2015 videos.
Robert Griesemer’s keynote highlighted the Pascal (via Oberon) heritage of Go, and remarked that Pascal is a European language family. The C heritage of Go that is more commonly referenced is North American. He hoped Go is a merging of the two software cultures.
And finally, joke of the conference has to go to Tomás Senart.