GoDays Berlin

GoDays 20

During the 21th to the 23th of January it was finally time for the second edition of the GoDays here in Berlin. The event invites beginners, Go Experts and everyone in between. This year we had one day of workshops and two days of conference with speakers on three different stages. The main stage did not only contain interesting speakers, but also connected with the lounge area where a networking break was planned in between every session. During the conference all the three stages were recorded. So if you missed out or want to rewatch some your favourites you can do so the GoDays Youtube channel 

What is Go?

Go or Golang is an open source programming language developed by Google. The primary motivation for having a new language was to create something that can handle the scale of programming at Google, both in numbers of lines of code and number of engineers working on the code. Another important kind of scale is the scale of interconnections between programs. In November 2019 Go celebrated its 10th birthday and is now estimated to be used by a million developers Worldwide.

Docker, Etcd, Istio, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Terraform for example are written in Go and proven to be useful for startups building from scratch as well as enterprises modernizing their software stack. However, the success of Go is not just the language itself, but ecosystem and the community around it. Meetup groups for Go have become popular. There are now 173 groups in 47 different countries. Together with these we also have Go Bridge and Women who Go. Both with a more direct focus to include underrepresented communities, to teach technical skills and to foster diversity in Go.

Voices from the participants

In the lounge area I had the pleasure of meeting up with Jessica Greene, Developer Ecosia, and Mandy Lan, Backend Developer at FromAtoB  who both work with Go in their everyday job.

Let us know some of your impressions of the GoDays so far!

Jessica;
I attended GoDays last year, which was the first time it happened, and was also the first conference that I spoke at. I was very grateful for the opportunity and also to get to be a speaker again this year. It is great to see that the conference is gaining attention and continuing to grow.

At Ecosia where I work the majority of our codebase for the backend and the infrastructure is written in Go or is using technology that is based on Go.

Go as a language is getting more popular, especially with celebrating the 10-year anniversary we can really start to reflect on what the language does and how it progresses. It has been awesome to see how the speakers talk about how the language develop as well as seeing a few first-time speakers getting on stage and sharing their views and opinions

Mandy;
This is my second visit as well. I wanted to see what it was like one year down the line and I realized that I learned a lot! Last year I was just getting started, but now I can be more engaged and understand more of the content. Things makes much more sense and I am able to apply it as well so for me it has been a great process. At fromAtoB we are using Go for our microservices and I find it very useful and easy to handle.

What would you say is the main reason to use Go?

The community! There is a great community here in Berlin, which we can see from the turnout here especially considering it is only the second year. Beyond the GoDays there are several Meetups where you can learn, connect and network. For example Women Who Go held a Meetup last evening hosted by fromAtoB. These communities are easy to join, you should join as well.

Jessica also held a session during the first day of the conference. You can find it here ; “Making greener choices: connecting people on their impact on the climate through technology”

 

There was also the opportunity to visit the booth of Loodse GmbH; who organize the GoDays as well as the upcoming Container Days. I had the chance to exchange a few words with Frank Müller;

You seem to be busy here, can you let us know more about your role?

Yes! I am employed by the Loodse Gmbh and as someone who is working with Go Development and working for the organizer, it is near that I also have my own talk here. The first day I gave a workshop named “Kubernetes- without container – but with lots of Go”. As the conference started I also held the keynote “One Decade of Go” , for the first conference day and for the second day my talk “Fun with Functions”

I’m happy to see that we are covering so many different aspects. We are still growing, so for this year we needed a bigger location, an interesting one, and as we can see the smaller rooms have been quite full.

Why Go?

To me that is the wrong question. I don’t think we should ask why we should use Go, but more we should ask where. Just like any programming language Go is just the tool. Go has been designed for Cloud-Native applications. Google has designed Go for their own problems and this software can handle high loads, large amounts, which we can now see in the type of projects where it is being used, so I think Go is the right language for Cloud-Native.

What is your tip for the beginners?

If you want to start with Go, you should start at the Golang website. There you will find your first overview of the of the features. Then you will see that there are a lot of subpages to guide you. You also have example available where you can test and try the code without having to download it to your own computer. Once you are more advanced there are several ways to build up your knowledge via slack channels, events and communities.

What will happen next?

For Loodse as a company we are looking forward to the Container Days and for me I am looking forward to further contribution in the Cloud-Native area.

While packing our things together I managed to ask Mirabella Meyer for her final thoughts on the GoDays 2020;

I am very happy with the turn out! The number of attendees as well as the vibe. Happy to see that people talked to each other and learned from each other. The feedback I received so far have been very nice.

Are you planning to have a similar event next year?

We will definitely continue with the GoDays series! Maybe in a different scope but are already certain that there

will be an event again and most likely in Berlin

Where should I be on the lookout?

Our website  will continue update news, and save the dates for further events. There you can subscribe to our newsletter and also for social media. You can find us now on Instagram under godays_berlin

Thank you so much and see you next year!

Emelie Gustafsson