Go at OSCON
20 Aug 2014
Tags: conference, oscon

Francesc Campoy

* Introduction

What happens in Portland in July? [[http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014][OSCON]]! At
this year's conference, Go was more present than ever before, with five talks,
two workshops, a
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_of_a_feather_(computing)][Birds of a Feather]]
session, and a meetup.

* Talks

[[http://twitter.com/mstine][Matt Stine]] talked about his experience switching
from Java to Go with
[[http://www.slideshare.net/mstine/java-devlearnstogooscon][A recovering Java developer learns Go]]
while [[https://twitter.com/spf13][Steve Francia]] presented
[[http://spf13.com/presentation/MongoDB-and-Go][Painless Data Storage with MongoDB and Go]].
Steve also presented
[[http://spf13.com/presentation/go-for-object-oriented-programmers][Go for Object Oriented Programmers]],
where he explained how some object oriented concepts can be implemented in Go.

.image osconreport/talks.png _ 800

Finally, [[http://twitter.com/offbymany][Josh Bleecher Snyder]] talked about his
experience writing tools to work with Go source code in
[[https://talks.golang.org/2014/hammers.slide#1][Gophers with hammers]],
and [[http://twitter.com/francesc][Francesc Campoy]] talked about all the things
that could have gone wrong and what the Go team did to prevent them
[[https://talks.golang.org/2014/playground.slide][Inside the Go playground]].

* Workshops

At the beginning of OSCON's workshop day, Steve Francia presented how to build a
web application and a CLI tool during
[[http://spf13.com/presentation/first-go-app][Getting started with Go]] to a big
room full of Gophers.

.image osconreport/workshops.png _ 800

In the afternoon, [[https://twitter.com/mmceniry][Chris McEniry]] gave his
[[http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/115/A%20Quick%20Introduction%20to%20System%20Tools%20Programming%20with%20Go%20Presentation.pdf][Quick introduction to system tools programming with Go]] where he went over some useful skills to
write system tools using Go and its standard library.

* Additional events

To take advantage of the increased Gopher population in Portland during OSCON, we
organized two extra events: the first [[https://twitter.com/pdxgolang][PDXGolang]]
meetup and a
[[http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/37775][Birds of a Feather session]].

.image osconreport/meetup.png _ 800

At the meetup Francesc Campoy talked about
[[https://talks.golang.org/2013/bestpractices.slide][Go Best Practices]] and
[[https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower][Kelsey Hightower]] gave a great
introduction to [[https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes][Kubernetes]],
a container management system for clusters written in Go by Google. If you live
in Portland, make sure you [[http://meetup.com/pdx-go][join the group]] and come
along to the next meeting.

The "Birds of a Feather" (or, more aptly, "Gophers of a Feather") was a lot of
fun for everyone involved. We hope to see more of you there next year.

* In conclusion

.image osconreport/random.png _ 800

Thanks to all the gophers that participated in OSCON. After the successes of
this year we look forward to more Go fun at OSCON 2015.