This May I visited Gophercon EU, a big conference about Go. It was held in the south of Tenerife. There were many things that I experienced for the first time! For example, it was my first time on an island and it was my first time to talk to Mat Ryer, Bill Kennedy and other gophers who write books and articles about Go and make it so popular and understandable. It was also the first time I took a coding workshop.
I was able to take part in this conference because I got a scholarship from GoBridge. I filled in the application form long ago and then forgot about it because I knew that the chance of being selected is very small. How happy I was when I got the email saying that my application was approved! It was about 1 a.m. when I read it and I woke up my mom to tell her great news and the two of us couldn’t sleep for the next couple of hours because we were so excited and happy. I’m smiling now when I’m writing these lines and remembering that night.
Then there were weeks of preparations for the trip and anticipation. I’ve read about speakers I didn’t know (I already knew some of them from previous conferences) and decided what talks I want to hear. Choosing talks beforehand is one of the key steps in preparing for the conference. Many conferences have more than one track and even if there is only one track, it’s extremely hard to stay focused the whole day and keep absorbing new information so you have to chose what is the most interesting. It may be difficult if there are many topics relevant to what you are currently doing at work so it’s nice to have time to think it over and not to leave decisions for the last 5 minutes before a talk.
On the first day of Gophercon, I took part in a workshop “Daily Go” by Miki Tebeka. There was a lot of practice and Miki showed us best practices of code structuring, debugging, performance testing and even some basics of CI/CD. He also shared useful links and I saved them to read later. I think that I’ll use in my daily work a lot of what he showed during this workshop.
There were many great talks on the second day. I especially liked two of them: “Finding Dependable Go Packages” by Julie Qiu and “How I Write HTTP Web Services after 8 Years” by Matt Ryer. I hope the organizers will post videos so that my colleagues who missed the conference could also see these talks. I also had a chance to talk to speakers during breaks. It’s one of the things you should visit conferences for. When you watch recordings, you cannot dive into this atmosphere and profit from real-time communication.
The third day of the conference was Community Day. It was less formal and many people gave talks on important Go-related topics. I made notes so that I can explore in-depth aspects that can be handy for my tasks.
All three days were very different and each of them brought me lots of valuable information. I’m very glad that I had a chance to visit Gophercon EU 2019, learn, network and meet new friends.
Reaching out 