The European Go Conference, October 10th in Paris | Hacker News Reader

The European Go Conference, October 10th in Paris

dotgo.eu

33 pointssylvinus10 comments

So I am about to finish university in a couple of months and I have been using Go for the past year. Would it be a good idea to go to this conference or maybe wait a bit longer before I have more experience/money?

(I live in the UK)

A good idea to go.

It's a hacker conference, meaning it's cheap/affordable and there will be more focus on code and interesting things you can do with the code.

It's also cheap to get to from the UK as Eurostar in advance is relatively affordable, especially when compared to the cost of US conferences.

You will get to meet a lot of people, and right now people who can demonstrate a good standard of Go programming are definitely in demand. So you can make contacts to help get you a job (though you may already have a job by the time the conference comes around).

I hate the word "networking"... but "nerding out with people who share an interest in a set of technologies and a language" works pretty well. Especially given that this world is quite small, make friends now and when you are looking for a job some of them may remember that they met and liked you... and wouldn't it be good to give you a break whilst they gain another solid set of hands.

I say all of this with the caveat that I've been to a fair few conferences, and I'd recommend strongly steering clear of the heavily business and corporate focused events (obvious by the £500+ fees). But a hacker conference? Hell yeah.

Ok thanks ill look into it.

If you plan your trip a couple months before (or even now) you should get pretty good rates on Eurostar+hotel.

For the experience, definitely not an issue... Most attendees will be just like you and 1 year experience is already quite good for such a young language!

I'd better think of something to talk about now this has been announced :-)

Hey HN, what would you like me to talk about at this conference?

Talk about how you convinced CloudFlare to use Go for core products.

That was easy. I just wrote one of the core products in Go :-) Then someone wrote some SSL code, then we rewrote our DNS server in it.

It's a pretty easy drug to get hooked on, if you do things with lots of concurrent connections all doing similar things.

Ask forgiveness not permission? :-)

Aside from talking about Go at Cloudflare, some topics that may be interesting to me (someone who has used Go for personal and work projects, but works at a much smaller company):

* Deployment/sysops practices at Cloudflare, especially since (IIRC) a plurality but not majority of Cloudflare's internal services are written in Go

* Challenges maintaining your own DNS server (which is written in Go), and how you address them

* Maintaining a healthy relationship with the FOSS + language community (Cloudflare seems to place more importance on this than the average company[0][1])

(These are a mixture of things about Cloudflare and about Go, but depending on the format of the conference, people may be interested in some stuff that's more indirectly related Go as well)

[0] http://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-two-way-street

[1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/keeping-our-open-source-promise

Dammit, now I need to think of an excuse to be in Paris in October (and to get someone else to pay for that). ;)

In all seriousness, I'm glad this is happening. I'm going to GopherCon in April, and I'm glad that the Go community outside the US also seems to be strong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com