During our group’s first meeting (4 attendees), we thought about ways to raise awareness, increase membership and get in some hands-on experience with the Go language. I proposed setting up a one-day beginner’s workshop to see if that would generate interest, and it seemed like a good idea to the others so we went with it. We guessed that January would be the earliest month that would be feasible for this, so we chose Saturday the 16th and did a little planning.

I contacted a Cloudflare employee, David Kitchen, who had introduced himself to me and offered support just a few months earlier when I announced the formation of our group. He confirmed that Cloudflare would be happy to sponsor our proposed workshop and a couple of other Cloudflare employees, Frieda and Matthew, helped us out with arrangements for access, use of the facilities and catering. Now all we needed was to come up with some material and activities for the day.

For the workshop itself, it became clear from the RSVP information that our approx 15 attendees were going to be at all levels, experience-wise. One speaks regularly at conferences and has expert knowledge of the Go language, one or two had almost no experience with programming, the rest had development or devops backgrounds with or without exposure to Go itself. I put together a couple of small slide presentations on what Go is, why it exists, what it’s about, and some basic getting-started information. Nicola, who is a Go developer professionally, agreed to do her excellent short presentation on why she thinks Go is a good language for software developers to learn. For the rest of the day, I decided to set everyone loose on the tutorial introduction from the Go Programming Language book by Donovan and Kernighan, as it is freely available online. This book is very much in the mould of the classic K&R C Programming Language book, but the example programs have come on some way from the “let’s reimplement unix command-line utilities” approach in that 1970s classic.

Putting the work in workshop

Participants asked a lot of good, insightful questions throughout the slide presentations, and worked very well together on the tutorial. Maria uploaded one of the sample programs to the github repo I set up for the workshop. Everyone who attended said they’d be interested in doing it again, so we’re looking to have a workshop in March. I put my slides on github. As for Cloudflare, the group was blown away by their hospitality and we really cannot thank them enough.