Golang UK 2017

As I’ve spent more and more time writing Go both at work and at home for projects like StrangeNewPlaces, I’ve decided to shift my focus towards Go-related conferences this year. This means that besides dotGo later this year I’ve also attended GolangUK in London during the last couple of days.

This time with a workshop

The conference took place between August 15 and August 17 in The Brewery, a very central and beautiful event venue near the Moorgate station. This time around I also attended one of the workshops as one was originally planned to be The Ultimate Go workshop by William Kennedy. Sadly, he couldn’t make it and the workshop ended up more targeted at intermediate users. Still, a very good workshop held by Mark Bates which also included a short introduction to gRPC and Protobuf 🙂

The main event

The main event was split into two tracks with tons of interesting talks. You can find the complete schedule on the GolangUK.com website but I just want to list all the things I’ve personally learnt thanks to these sessions:

• If your package does HTTP requests, you should allow your users to pass in their own net/http.Client instance so that they can control aspects like timeouts. (Writing beautiful packages by Mat Ryer)
• As the channel reader can easily determine whether a channel was closed, the writer should always be the one closing it. I had known about this for quite some time but I somehow failed to see that the existence of the ok-return value when reading from a channel made this rule obvious. (Concurrency Patterns in Go by Arne Claus)
• If you have an endless loop without time.Sleep, at least add runtime.GoSched() to yield. (Concurrency Patterns in Go by Arne Claus)
• The Spinning Compare and Swap (Spinning CAS) pattern: Basically use atomic.CompareAndSwap in a tight-loop to handle locks without having to require things like mutexes. (Concurrency Patterns in Go by Arne Claus)
• Pretty much everything from Sean Kelly’s awesome talk about embedding. This is probably the one language feature I know the least about so I really appreciated this long-form introduction.
• The errgroup package for handling synchronisation of multiple go-routines. (How to correctly use package context by Jack Lindamood)
• go-i18n is used for instance by Buffalo for internationalisation. (Rapid web development in go by Mark Bates)
• Pretty much everything in Buffalo can be replaced except for gorilla/mux as router. (Rapid web development in go by Mark Bates)
• Buffalo provides its own database migration framework with Pop. (Rapid web development in go by Mark Bates)
• tfortools by Mark Ryan looks like the perfect library for providing templating support for your command-line tool. It not only contains a handful of extremely useful template functions but also automatically generates the documentation for what is available within the templates. (Command-line scripting with templates by Mark Ryan)
• Pretty much all of Production ready go by Ian Kent. Most of the things in there are well-known by now. It’s still great to have all the timeout-hints collected in one talk 🙂
• golang.org/x/net/websocket only implements a subset of the RFC6455 websocket spec, hence you should probably prefer gorilla/websocket or github.com/gobwas/ws.

Sadly, I missed Brian Ketelsen’s final keynote about Go for the Enterprise but I hope I will be able to watch it online in a couple of days 🙂

The social event

On the evening of the first talk-day there was also a nice social event with BBQ and drinks. The weather was still nice enough, so we could enjoy the tiki bar without having to run between roofs 😉 While the idea of offering a completely customisable BBQ with dishes like pulled pork, kimchi, raw salmon and the likes was awesome, it sadly didn’t scale that well for more than 400 attendees. After 40 minutes I still saw some people in the queue.

The venue and catering

That being said, the food there and during the conference as a whole was excellent. Everything was well prepared and the whole organisation was just flawless.

Same goes for the venue. The seating was comfortable, thanks to some additional TV-screens I could see the slides even from the very back of the room, and there was water readily available everywhere. Perhaps the one thing I’d improve about the catering next year would be fruits instead of bonbons on the tables. But perhaps that’s a British thing 🙂

Conclusion

Over the course of these three days I’ve learnt so much that this post can only offer a very brief summary. I really, really liked the conference and cannot wait for next year’s GolangUK 🙂 Sadly, London is probably not the best city for me and my health right now, but the trip was still well worth it! Big thanks to the organisers, speakers, sponsors, and everyone else that made this such a great conference!

Perhaps next year I will even dare to speak to other people and not hide behind my laptop or iPad 😢