The Best Feature of Go [Gophercon BR 2018]

In this talk I expose how to engage with the Go community, which in my humble opinion, the the best feature of the language. From writing open source code to giving talks and organizing events, everyone at every skill level is able to contribute somehow. I talk about my experiences doing those things and lessons learned about trying to do everything at once. *spoiler alert*: it didn't end well. So contributing is important, but do it in a healthy way and you'll really be fine. :)

Transcript

1. The Best Feature of Go Daniela Petruzalek Senior Consultant @ ThoughtWorks Google Developer Expert daniela.petruzalek@gmail.com September 29th, 2018
2. Go Has Some Really Nice Features • Channels • Goroutines • Interfaces • Tests • Reflection • … • Community (!?)
3. Go: Building On the Shoulders of Giants (...) C++ Ruby C# Java C Shell Perl Python PHP Pascal JS Oberon Pascal Modula Steve Francia’s Talk @ Curry On: https://goo.gl/iK2G8b
4. People > Technology
5. "None of what we do in terms of writing software, open source software, would be possible without community. (...) Without the community the technical work cannot exist." Naomi Ceder, chair of the PSF board of directors, EuroPython 2016
6. What do you expect from a senior engineer?
7. "I came for the language, but I stayed for the community." Brett Cannon, Python Core Dev, PyCon US 2014
8. "I came for the community, and I’m staying for the community. (But the language is really cool!)" Daniela Petruzalek, Gopher @ Gophercon UK 2018 :)
9. - Software Engineer (C++) - Oracle DBA - Sales Consultant (Database) - Software Engineer (Big Data) Before Go...
10. My First Community Talk - Rails Girls Pelotas (Feb 2017) - http://railsgirls.com
11. My Personal Mission - Become the reference that I didn't have when I was younger - Help making the IT industry a more humane environment
12. My History with Go - The birth of Women Who Go Porto Alegre
13. Women Who Go Scholarship
14. What can I do to give back to this community?
15. Types of Contributions • Open Source • Organizing Events • Public Speaking • Writing Articles • Mentoring / Teaching • User Experience / Reporting • ...
16. Disclaimer Don’t try doing everything on this list, at least not at the same time.
17. Open Source
18. Personal Projects https://github.com/danicat/spinarago
19. My First Contribution to Go
20. My Newest Contribution!
21. Organizing the Gophercon Talks Repository
22. The Feedback
23. Improving golang-samples
24. About Fixing Examples...
25. Improving the ‘gota’ Package
26. Contributing With Code... 1. It’s not limited to the experts 2. Find your comfort zone 3. Try to improve a package you like 4. No ideas? Start with https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go
27. Organizing Events
28. Women Who Go Porto Alegre https://github.com/wwg-poa/pacgo
29. Gophercon BR 2017 Diversity Scholarship - First year: - 7 women among 180 attendees (~4%) - Last year (2nd edition): - 19 women among 229 attendees (~8%) - 5 scholarship recipients
30. About organizing - You don’t need to know Go to organize a meetup - Main challenges: finding sponsors, venues and speakers - Good way to improve social skills - You can organize other things besides meetups - You may collaborate with already existing events - You can (should) start small - It can be very time consuming
31. Public Speaking
32. Motivation - Useful tool for learning new things - Great opportunity for meeting new people and places - There is a high demand for new speakers!
33. About Public Speaking... - Start small to build confidence - Article: How to become a successful technical speaker - Nice balance in time to prepare x impact - It’s often useful to give your personal perspective about something - Keeping track of the talks: - https://github.com/danicat/public-speaking
34. Writing Articles
35. Writing about your experiences https://goo.gl/smN9qn
36. Latest article https://goo.gl/oHGzi4
37. About writing articles - Articles (or videos) can scale better than talks - Talk transcriptions may be useful topics as well - Keep it short for higher impact (under 10 min, ideal 6-8 min) - Write about stuff that you are trying to understand
38. Mentoring / Teaching
39. About Mentoring - 1:1 approach - Not very scalable, but huge impact - Doesn’t need to be done in person - Twitter - Whatsapp
40. Ready 2 Go Beginner’s Workshop - Gophercon BR 2017 - In partnership with Ellen Korbes (@ellenkorbes) - Later turned it into a talk
41. Wrapping it Up
42. Life After Go... - Google Developer Expert (GDE) - Google Launchpad Mentor - Lead organizer at GDG POA, WWG POA and WTM POA - Member of Gophercon Brazil Board of Advisors - Head of New Chapters at Women Who Go - Writer at Hackernoon - Speaker at several conferences and meetups
43. The Result...
44. Lessons Learned - You don’t need to accept every offer - Keep the focus on your personal mission - Choose the things that you are more comfortable with - There are infinite ways to contribute to the community
45. daniela.petruzalek@gmail.com https://linkedin.com/in/petruzalek https://twitter.com/danicat83 Questions?