GopherConAU 2024: Workshop review

GopherConAU 2024 Workshops

The workshops for GopherConAU 2024 were held at the Sydney Convention Centre. I ran the introductory workshops. The morning session was for complete beginners and the afternoon session was for developers.

The format of two separate workshops is new. Previously the workshop was targetted at beginners to programming and run for one group. The idea with the two workshops was to target a broader audience. There were a lot of people with some programming experience who wanted to learn Go. So not everyone would attend both sessions. But some people might.

What worked

• Starting coding straight away
• Small examples kept momentum going
• People experiemented; trying to break things
• Everyone in the afternoon had Go installed

What could be improved

• The morning session was a bit slow for some people.
• Provide more exercises and activity for people who finish early
• The afternoon had to cater for people who did not attend the morning session. So there needed to be review of content
• Students used AI auto completion and did not spend time working on the answers

Take aways to consider

• More clearly target experienced developers and increase the complexity of the content
• Consider larger examples. Could have examples that build on content more.
• Ensure students are reviewing any auto generated code. Focus on the engineering side of coding to consider why certain approaches are taken and what imrpovements can be made.

Two workshops in one day

Descriptions from the gophercon website.

Morning session

Intro to Go for Complete Beginners

An introduction with lots of hands on practice

• Online development Environment
• Programming Fundamentals
• An introduction to the basic syntax of the language
• Debugging

Prerequisites

None! If you already know, how to code, please consider the aternoon workshops.

What an attendee is expected to learn

• Learning in a friendly environment
• The initial getting started with Go

Afternoon session

Getting Started with Go for developers

An introduction to Go prgamming with lots of hands on practice

• Online development Environment
• Go error handling
• Testing with Go
• Standard librbary
• Web development

Prerequisites

Familiarity with basic programming concepts (variables, functions, loops) in any language is recommended.

What an attendee is expected to learn

• Hands on experience with some of Go specifc features
• The initial getting started with Go

Workshop repos

The workshops for GopherCon 2024.

• Half day workshop for beginners
  https://github.com/leahgarrett/go-intro-half-day-workshop-for-beginners
• Half day workshop for developers
  https://github.com/leahgarrett/go-intro-half-day-workshop-for-developers

Gophers images sourced from

• GohperConAu website
• Gophers from Ashley Mcnamara
  https://github.com/ ashleymcnamara/gophers