Gophercon 2014 in Denver

I'm very pleased to have been to that conference and it was a great one.

I did enjoy the single track approach and almost all the speakers where good so it went very smoothly.

The crowd

I really liked the attendees in general. It was a very smart crowd with many founders and very knowledgeable developers.
I think because of the language features Go attracts people that are experienced and value things like maintainability, readability and performance. People who like things that are well designed and have a pragmatic approach.

Most people where involved with more back-end & dev-ops roles and I that's just my kind of crowd :)

It was great to be able to chat with some pillars of the Go community.

The Go Team

I think the Go team itself really needs to be praised (Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Andrew Gerrand, Brad Fitzpatrick, Russ cox).

They where so humble and accessible and I really believe that set the tone for the conference.

There they where at the pub crawl a midnight, middling with the crowd.

Then on Saturday, during the hack day, after the conference was over, there was Rob Pike, seating at the next table, hacking with the Gobot team, how cool is that !



It was also very interesting to see the very different backgrounds and personalities of the Go team. I think because of this every decision is dissected and really thought through, which leads to quality decisions.

They however do all seem to favor simplicity and pragmatism and that's music to my hears.

The organizers

Let's not forget them, they made this happen and it was obviously not a simple task.
Kudos to them, I think it's not common for a first conference to go this smoothly.

Go-ing forward

It's amazing how much Go has grown just in the past year.

I'm confident it will become a top ten language shortly(1 or 2 years ?) and eventually make the top 5.

Go reminds me very much of Java when it first came out, before you say that's insulting remember Java 1.0:

• It was very simple and readable compared to the alternatives at the time.

• It was Free, eventually Open source(-ish) but pushed by a large company. (Go does better here of course)

• It made concurrency and networking much simpler.

• Many people thought it was limited and not very powerful looking. Things you hear about Go from people that don't get the point.

Some of the java issues now that I'm thinking won't happen to Go:

• Performance: Obviously the JVM is a well oiled machine now, but Java was a beast for 5 to 10 years, Go is way ahead already.

• Bloat (a.k.a "enterprise"). It's very clear the Go team is strongly against any of that, I doubt there will be a Go-EE under this team watch :)

I'm even more bullish and excited about Go's future now !

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