GopherCon India 2015

I came to GopherCon India not knowing what to expect, but from the moment I arrived it was nothing short of spectacular. I talked to amazing people who genuinely appreciated that members of the global community came to India to participate in the event. I think in their minds this legitimized the conference and gave them a sense of pride that India was important to the global Go community.

The conference started with a one day workshop, where 25+ people had an opportunity to learn Go. The workshop attempted to prepare them for the conference but also teach them enough of the language to get started on their own. Many of the Ruby and Python developers after the workshop expressed confidence that Go was a language they could learn, be productive in and hopefully use professionally in the future.

On the second and third day, the speakers had their turn and the format was perfect. Keynote speakers had 45 minutes and the rest of the speakers had 25. This single track format kept many people in the room throughout the conference and focused on what the speakers were presenting. After every three talks, the conference goers met outside for either tea or lunch. It was a perfect time to talk to speakers and discuss each talk. Sourcegraph enlisted the help of speakers to live blog, which allowed the global community to share in the talks as well.

The opening talk by Francesc really set the stage for the conference. He talked about the evolution of a Gopher and how people can progress in the community from being newcomers to advocates. The message was that it took all stages of Gophers to make the community great. This provided a sense of inclusion for everyone who attended. Regardless where you were personally in your own evolution, you had something incredible to share and your time and talents were welcome.

The speakers who came from India all had amazing things to share. I could see the pride in the room when they were on stage giving their talks. I was personally impressed by all of them.

Day 1:

Niket Patel - Joy of Single Purpose Services in Go

Shiju Varghese - Building RESTful Services With Go and MongoDB

Baiju Muthukadan - Web Development using Go and Ember.js

Rajesh Ramachendran, - CGO, Under the Hood

Baishampayan Ghose - Closing Keynote: The Roots of Go

Day 2:

Kunal Powar - EMBD

Sunil Sayyaparaju - Concurrent, High Performance Data Access With Go

Amit Upadhyay - An Alternate Approach to Data

Piyush Verma - Gottp: A Micro Backend Framework in Go

Sriram Melkote - N1QL a Query Language in Go. It Makes “Cents”

Dr. Sendil Devar - Go for Simulations in Wireless Research

Jyotiska NK - Image Processing in Scale with Go

Those who travelled internationally also shared great teaching moments, thoughts and opinions. The speakers represented countries from Australia, Austria, France, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the United States.

Day 1:

Francesc Campoy Flores - Gopher: From Darkness to Enlightenment

Aaron Cruz - Herding Gophers

Gabriel Aszalos - The Gopher from the Future

Mike Gehard - A Journey from Ruby to Go

William Kennedy - Go In Action

Julia Poladsky - Go for Front End Developers

Jason Moiron - Go Faster: Optimising Go Programs

Keiji Yoshida - Practical Tips for Creating a Go Package Successfully

Beyang Liu - Go metaprogramming

Verónica López - Concurrency by Data Structures (and Nasty Examples)

Alan Shreve - Principles of Designing Go APIs with Channels

Day 2:

Bryan Liles - Embracing the Standard Library

Martin Schoch - bleve - Modern Text Indexing for Go

Speaker Q&A

David Calavera - High Performance Git Infrastructure with Go

Lakshan Perera - Building Internet of Things with Go

Matthew Campbell - How to Keep Wall Street Chatting Using Go

Guillaume J. Charmes - Raytracing in Go

Dave Cheney - Simplicity and the Ideas that Go Left Behind

On the second day we had 3 people come up on stage to give 5 minute lighting talks. These were conference attendees that were incredibly excited and deserving to be a part of the event. Krishna Sundarram discussed the difference between goroutines and threads. Yeshwanth Kumar talked about composing micro containers using Megam PaaS. Finally, Bhasker Kode talked about why it’s important to instrument your Go code.

Dave Cheney provided an inspiring closing talk about understanding and embracing Go’s simplicity. That Go’s simplicity doesn’t mean “easy”, but it might mean “straightforward” or “uncomplicated”. That good programmers write simple programs. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” as Leonardo da Vinci once said. This simplicity extends itself to provide support for large teams, the need for fewer dependencies and a simple build system.

Two amazing women who were at the workshop came up to me after the conference. They were so excited and eager to be an active part of both the local and global community. When I asked if they would like to be introduced to other women in the community, their faces lit up. For me, their excitement alone made the entire conference worth being there and a success.

If I take one thing away from the conference it was the excitement I felt from everyone that was there. I heard time and time again that Go was a language they wanted to learn. A language that could help them be more productive and a community they could be involved in.

People experienced how vibrant, warm, friendly, supporting and accessible the local and global Go community is. This helped to foster confidence in people to start conversations, ask questions and remove any doubt that they were on their own. People left the conference knowing that they could all be a part of something that is bigger than themselves. Regardless of where they were on their journey.

In closing, a huge amount of thanks needs to go out to the conference organizers. Ajey Gore, Gautam Rege, Karan Misra, Santosh B Malleshappa and last but not least Satish Talim. Without their vision, passion and drive none of this would have been possible. We all saw how tirelessly they worked over the three days to make the conference run smooth and be the success it was.

Slide Decks

Slides for all the talks can be found on Github