GopherCon Turns Three

tl;dr We’re excited for the third anniversary of GopherCon, so we’re offering a discount on tickets valid only on the anniversary of the conference.

Humble Beginnings

In 2013, Brian and I were lamenting the fact that there was no conference for Go. We were enjoying the language, using it everyday, and truly disappointed that there was no place for all Go enthusiasts to get together and learn. We decided that it couldn’t be too hard to run a conference, so we did what all good software people do: we registered a domain.

GopherCon 2014

We wrote a nice retrospective about GopherCon 2014, so we will only hit the highlights here.

We had no expectations for the success that GopherCon 2014 achieved. We did expect a few hundred Gophers to come to Denver to learn and network. Instead we had to change our room layout twice and negotiate with the Marriott twice to get bigger space because we had more demand for tickets than we had space for people!

2014 really showed us that there’s a strong Go community of developers and companies who love Go and are willing to come together for an Go focused event. We were truly humbled by the involvement of the community.

GopherCon 2015

For 2015, we aimed higher. We booked the Colorado Convention Center, effectively doubling our capacity. And you, the Go Community, showed us that we chose wisely. We had over 1300 people attend from all corners of the globe. More talks, more sponsors, more opportunities for networking… it was a great way for Gophers to get together and learn about Go.

GopherCon 2016 - July 11-13th, 2016

This year, we’ve changed several things based on your feedback. We’re trying a new concept for multiple tracks. Many people have asked for more content, but an equal number enjoy the single-track feel of the first two GopherCon events. We’re going to keep our mornings single-track, but split the afternoon into three different tracks. Two tracks will offer tutorials and advanced content, while in the main auditorium we’ll do lightning talks, presenter Q&A sessions, and invited speakers. We hope that this will give you the opportunity to choose more advanced sessions based on your interest level, while keeping the plenary sessions as a single-track schedule.

Training Workshops

As an added feature this year, we’re making training sessions available on the day before the conference. These workshops aren’t part of GopherCon and require separate admission, but are conveniently scheduled on the day before the conference. You can now come in a day earlier and get some great Go training.

Ultimate Go Workshop - a full day of Go training for developers who have come to Go more recently

Advanced Go Workshop - for more experienced Go developers, this class dives deeper into Go and offers more advanced training

Building an API with Go - Learn how to make an HTTP based API in Go and take it from idea to production deployment with this class by experienced API developers Brian Ketelsen and Raphael Simon.

Celebration Time!

To celebrate our third birthday, we’re offering discounts on General Admission and Workshop tickets using the following discount codes:

For a $50 discount on General Admission tickets use code BIRTHDAY2016

For a $50 discount on any Workshop (Ultimate Go, Advanced Go, Building an API with Go) use code BIRTHDAYWORKSHOP

These discount codes are only valid from April 24th through April 27th, the anniversary of our first GopherCon event in 2014. We hope you’ll join us again in Denver this year, for what we hope will be the best GopherCon ever.

Thank You

GopherCon wouldn’t happen without you, the Go community, and our amazing sponsors. Several of our sponsors have been with us all three years.

So far this year we’re sponsored by these amazing companies:

Google

Twitch

Ardan Labs

Compose.io

Verizon

Minio.io

Datadog

iron.io

Hashicorp

Comcast

InfluxDB

Heroku

YikYak

CrowdStrike

Docker

Intel