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Marco
  • Fri Aug 23 2024

Gophercon UK 2024

Gophercon UK 2024

We went to Gophercon UK

In the past few years, Go has become a prominent tool for us at Nimble Ape. Its power, flexibility and scalability mean it’s become the language we first turn to when setting up to develop server or desktop software, both for our clients and for our internal projects and tools. However, the Go ecosystem is huge and ever-expanding, and there is always a lot to learn to keep up with the evolution of the language. Therefore, I was very excited to attend my first GopherCon UK conference in London last week and learn about the latest developments from the best and brightest in the field.

GopherCon UK took place at The Brewery conference space, attracting around 400 attendees for a two-day event. The programme included three tracks of talks, with an opening and closing keynote each day. The event offered a range of technical sessions aimed at both beginners and experienced Go developers.

Audience attending a keynote talk at Gophercon UK 2024
Audience attending a keynote talk at Gophercon UK 2024

The quality of all the talks I attended was very high. Some of the highlights for me were:

  • “Load testing distributed web services”, in which George Malamidis explained how loveholidays achieved record performance and cost efficiency by automating daily load testing and using real production traffic to ensure system stability and scalability;
  • “Event driven workflows” by Andrew Wormald, who took us through his journey of developing an open-source framework for event-driven workflows.
  • “Building graphical Go apps is Fyne”: Andrew Williams, CEO at FyneLabs, showcased Fyne, a framework for developing native GUI apps in Go that run on every platform. Frameworks like this are really expanding what’s possible to create with Go, which is very exciting!

It’s 2024, so there had to be a few talks about AI! I was pleased to see that they offered a practical approach on how to use AI tools productively, rather than buying into the hype:

  • In his talk “Improving your code craft with generative AI”, Liam Hampton showed how to write better prompts in Copilot Chat to get the results we want. The trick? Be very specific, provide examples of what you want, point to files you want to use as reference, and always check the output you get!
  • Beth Anderson’s keynote “Decoding AI: A Go Programmer’s Perspective” walked us through the history of AI and Machine Learning, explaining the opportunities and the risks when navigating the current AI hype.

All the sessions were very technical and informative. I found great insights on using code profiling and metrics to improve performance, load testing in production and new tools for developing GUI apps, and I’m eager to test out what I’ve learned in some of our next projects.

If you missed the conference, the talks are available on their YouTube channel: I’m already going through the ones I couldn’t attend! I highly recommend GopherCon UK to Go developers of any level: Beginner or seasoned pro, you’ll be sure to learn a lot.

I’m already looking forward to next year!


Need help?

Nimble Ape has been consulting on real-time media projects for a decade. We build products, including in Go, for clients big and small all over the globe. If you’re working on these technologies and need some extra support, we’re happy to help.

Why not drop us a line on contact@nimblea.pe.

- Marco and the Nimble Ape team

Go programmingGopherCon UKEvent-driven workflowsLoad testingGenerative AIFyneConferences