My experience at GopherCon UK 2024

I already said it before, but GopherCon UK is one of my favorite conferences about Go Worldwide. The speakers, the depth of the topics, the food, the venue... It is amazing, and this year hasn't been any different. I want to thank, as always, Mattermost for all the support on the preparation of my talk and the trip, the GopherCon UK organization for such a delightful event, and the speakers for all the high-quality content put out there. Over the two days, I attended several amazing talks and had good conversations with other gophers.

The social part

One of the best things about conferences is the networking and the social part. I had the pleasure of talking with people like Bryan Boreham , Arianna Vespri , Jamie Tanna , ??Matthew Boyle , César Armada , David Cheney , William Kennedy , María Alonso , Chris Brown , Arti Phugat , Daniela Petruzalek , Fernando Villamarin Diaz , Shivam Acharya , Peter Chai , Jason C. and many more, thanks all, that has been the best part of the event for me.

My Talk

I did talk about the Go runtime internals, how it works, how it gets initialized, and why it is there. The room was almost full, and considering it was in the big room, I was very happy. The last-minute surprise was that Michael Pratt (developer of the runtime inside the Go team) would be in the audience. Who doesn't like a surprise, right?

A cool thing is that the recording is already there, so if you want to check it out, take a look here:

And if you want to see the slides are here:

But let's stop talking about me and talk about the amazing presentations made by the other speakers. Some of them are already available in the Youtube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDWZ5uzn69ezR6D6FUj_iBSOyRc9xaZFP&si=2fe6-iCD6OdMWtb_

Day 1

The Business of Go

Cameron Balahan kicked off the day with a fantastic overview of Go's adoption in the industry. He highlighted that Go has become a standard in sectors like cloud computing and suggested that Go has a unique opportunity to become the language of choice for AI in production environments.

Debugging Go Applications: From Local Headaches to Production Puzzles

This talk from ??Matthew Boyle focused on the different aspects of debugging Go applications. It covered everything from basic debugging techniques to more advanced approaches involving logging, metrics, and tracing. He guided us through the tools and techniques to tackle debugging challenges effectively, from small applications to distributed environments.

Improving Your Code Craft with Generative AI

Liam Hampton talked about leveraging tools like Copilot, Chat-GPT, and other language models to enhance code generation. He shared valuable tips and tricks for using Copilot and introduced prompt engineering concepts. This talk made me feel curious about the capabilities of the Copilot plugin in Vim.

Boost Applications Performance with Profile Guided Optimization

One of my favorite talks was by Michael Pratt. He did an excellent job explaining Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) and how it can be used to boost code performance. He delved into concepts like function inlining and escape analysis, providing a glance on why and how PGO works.

AI is Coming for Your Job

Adam Scholey's presentation tackled the fear of AI replacing human jobs. He emphasized that while AI is advancing, there are unique traits that humans bring to the table that remain irreplaceable. It was a thought-provoking talk that balanced the potential and concerns of AI in the workplace.

Day 2

Decoding AI: A Go Programmer’s Perspective

Beth Anderson explained various machine learning and AI concepts, highlighting that these are essentially algorithms. She stressed the importance of understanding the risks associated with AI, such as biases and ethical issues. This was a great reminder that we, as engineers, must be aware of the impact our role can have in society.

Let's Go Quantum

Sam Burns introduced quantum computing and its relevance to cryptography. He discussed the inclusion of post-quantum algorithms in the Go standard library's crypto package. The talk explained the hybrid approach in Go with elliptic curve and post-quantum cryptography (X25519Kyber768Draf00) and how to use it. He also shared what we should and should not be worrying about.

The Key to Go Efficiency is Just a Few Go Runtime Metrics Away!

Bart?omiej P?otka and Arianna Vespri highlighted the information available through Go runtime metrics. They showed how these metrics can detect various issues and provided insights into the Go runtime and garbage collector. It was a good reminder of the powerful tools we have at our disposal for optimizing Go applications.

Go Channels Slow Down with More CPUs

Grant ?? Stephens presented a bizarre yet intriguing issue they had at Fastly where channel performance degraded with more CPUs due to internal locking. He walked us through the problem analysis and the solutions they applied to fix it with a very nice story-telling style. A bit of internals, a bit of intrigue, and a whole spoon of wisdom.

Production-Ready “Hello, World!”

Daniela Petruzalek proposed an exercise of creating a production-ready "Hello, World!" application using only the Go standard library as a Kata. She walked us through the steps she followed to achieve this. The most interesting part is this exercise forces us to reflect on what it means to be production-ready to us.

Using Go to Scale Audit Logging at Cloudflare

Arti Phugat shared the story of how they scaled audit logging at Cloudflare . She discussed the challenges they faced and the solutions they implemented. It showcased practical problem-solving in a real-world scenario.

Another review

In this article I tried to keep it simple and share my sensations about the talks without too much detail, if you want to have a deeper description of some of the talks, there is a very detailed blog post from Jamie Tanna here: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2024/08/16/gophercon-uk-2024/

Conclusion

GopherCon UK was an amazing experience, inside and outside the rooms. A lot of passionate developers, a lot of outstanding engineers, and a lot of wisdom. For sure, I'll try to be there again next year.