Last Friday the very first Go conference on European soil took place in Paris, France. Organised by the fine folks of dotConferences this event filled the Théâtre des Variétés on the Boulevard Montmartre nearly completely.
Everybody got a Gopher!
It was a really awesome event; and I don’t say that just because I finally got a nice little plushy Gopher :) I wanted to learn and that I certainly did. Every talk was very informative. The focus of most was on the philosophy behind certain design decisions of the language (with interfaces being esp. in the spotlight here), but also quite a few were about general best practices in the community. For instance, having played around before with Keith Rarick’s godep I really appreaciated his talk on dependency management.
Group photo with all the speakers
If you want to know more about all the sessions, take a look at the live blog SourceGraph did :) I guess, they could use the speaker’s Wifi because there was none for the attendees, which was a shame but understandable given the rather tight location. And what a stylish location that was. According to Wikipedia opened in 1807 this theatre had a very historical and slightly posh atmosphere about it, adjectives that you normally don’t associated with a developer conference, but it worked quite well here. Only the break and lunch location in the 2nd floor was simply too small to hold all the attendees. I honestly don’t know how many people came, but I’d guess something around 400. An impressive number for the very first conference of any topic in Europe.
View from the second floor
The second day (Saturday) offered some workshops for people who still wanted to use the trip to Paris for some actual coding. I went to the one by Jeremy Saenz of Martini and Negroni fame. I had looked at Negroni before but only for like 10 minutes, so I really appreciated the chance to learn more about it in a controlled environment ;-) And I will definitely use it more in the future! In a short break there was even a bonus presentation by Harvey Kandola, CEO at Documize about their product and how they use Negroni middlewares. Great and practical stuff!
Same goes for the conference as a whole. There are some things I’d prefer to be handled differenty like still offering Wifi and a different style of after-party, the overall experience was great :D Now I’m really looking forward to dotJS by the same organisers in November and also already to the next dotGo in 2015!
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