GopherConAU 2023
Lots of great talks. Here I have picked five talks to discuss. To see
all the full talks checkout
https://www.youtube.com/@gopherconau
Lots of great talks. Here I have picked five talks to discuss. To see
all the full talks checkout
https://www.youtube.com/@gopherconau
Made a lot of clear points about the benefits of testing at scale.
Tables of data for tests
"On a large system more efficient in terms of coder hours to write a parser / loader for a test data file then manually write lots of tests"
Video of the talk "Go Testing By Example | GopherConAU 2023"
Fun talk walking you through some common issues developers find with pointers. Great to hear from a new developer who still feels the pain of the difficult lessons learnt. She used a really fun quiz style which generated heaps of varying opinions and would work well in a meetup.
"If you're curious about why you can't deep-copy a struct containing slices, when you should use pointer receivers vs. value receivers, how much space you really are saving by using a pointer or just how to stop your code from panicking, you should pack your towel and hitch a ride! "
Video of the talk "What's The Point? A Guide To Using Pointers Without Panicking | GopherConAU 2023"
When I presented the GopherConau review at the Golang Meetup some general feedback was surprise at the variety of talks. Some very technical, some very narrow about a specific topic, some very broad in scope, some more process focused and some more theoretical. Julia's talk about developing a programming language was a problem domain I had touched on from various angles, when working as a developer on a compiler and when working as software development educator.
It was interesting to hear her thought process about what to include and what not to include. We make these types of decisions a lot in programming. I might not be designing and building a new language, instead I might be making an API. The process of making something simple but not too simple is always a challenge.
Julia wanted a simple and easy intermediate language between
scratch and python. She had found that the
highly visual scratch overly simplified things making the
transition to commercial programming languages difficult.
The image with the move and line commands
was recognised by the Golang Meetup audience as Turtle Graphics used
in the Logo programming language. The Logo language
had versions on Apple, Commodore and even a version to manipulate
Lego.
Video of the talk "Building a Beginner's Programming Language with Go | GopherConAU 2023"
Really interesting to drill into analysing choices in development in a structured way. He mentioned an example that he asked someone to write a temperature calculator 15 different ways. Yes, this talk may cause analysis paralysis.
"One major part of Software Engineering is the art of trade-offs. It might be difficult to come up with different designs and how to figure out which one to use. In this talk we'll look at how to evaluate different designs and how to transform one design into another."
Video of the talk "Infinite Possibilities | GopherConAU 2023"
This talk closed out the conference. It was great to hear Rob's perspectives in an audience of fans.
A big surprise for me was that Rob saw the mascot as the biggest single contributor to the success of the language Go
"The objective was to displace C++ at Google. It has done a lot but not all C++ at Google has been replaced with Go. Outside of Google Go is more popular than he expected. It was an amazing feeling at the first GopherCon to see the reaction and number of people. :)"
Video of the talk "What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong | GopherConAU 2023"
