Happy Path To Go - GothamGo 2018

You’ve been hired for an exciting new role where you’ll use Go for the first time. After your whirlwind week of training, guess what? You have to transition your team of engineers to Go. Good luck! This talk gives practical advice for building a learning culture that empowers engineers to master Go.

Transcript

1. Transitioning teams to Golang Jonas Lead Engineer, Content Platform The Economist Happy Path To Go
2. Setting The Scene
3. Adam Smith Job Responsibility • CMS engineer responsible for all website related features • Drupal module development Experience • 5-10+ years with the Economist • Extensive Drupal community contributions • Javascript, CSS, PHP, MySQL Goal • Escape a limited enterprise system in search for a flexible, adaptive technology solution
4. Allie Greenspan Job Responsibility • Backend Engineer responsible for content distribution platform and API • Microservice development Experience • 2-10+ years with the Economist • AWS environment with emphasis on devops • Golang, SAM, Node.JS Goal • Apply their new technology toolset to deliver evolving business needs
5. Drupaler to Gopher How do you transform a team of CMS developers to a team of happy Gophers?
6. Exchange Rates What is NOT the same
7. Exchange Rates
8. Exchange Rates
9. Exchange Rates package blogs type Blog struct { ID string `json:"id"` Site string `json:"site"` Zone string `json:"zone"` } func (b *Blog) SetSite(site string) { b.Site = site } func (b *Blog) SetZone(zone string) { b.Zone = zone } package article type Article struct { ID string `json:"id"` Zone string `json:"zone"` Site string `json:"site"` } func (a *Article) SetSite(site string) { a.Site = site } func (a *Article) SetZone(zone string) { a.Zone = zone }
10. Applied Economics Retooling with TDD
11. Applied Economics Test Driven Development • Requirements • Test Case • Code
14. The Invisible Hand Peeking under the hood
15. The Invisible Hand PPROF and ExpVar • PPROF collects CPU profiles, traces, heap profiles, and mutex profiles. • Expvar exposes variables via an HTTP endpoint. It can also expose standard metrics such as memory usage and custom metrics
16. Market Failures You’ll get things wrong
17. When you transition a team, suddenly everyone is a rookie and you’ll inevitably ship some questionable code to production. • Goroutine Happy: Let’s put this in a Goroutine because it’ll be faster then right? • Interfaces? Yea I guess we should use those more. • Let’s import a library for every new functionality we need. Actually, looks like we can do it with the standard lib Market Failure
18. White Papers Peer Review like a boss
19. White Papers
20. White Papers • Submitters: Include explanations for your approach. Include an overview of the functionality, special processing, key decisions, and any areas of uncertainty • Reviewers: Ask clarifying questions. Cite GoDocs and other blogs or resources when recommending changes.
21. Wealth Redistribution Share the knowledge
22. Wealth Redistribution • Pairing • Brown bags • Team demos • Rotations on stories • Documentation • Community!
23. Consumer Confidence Celebrate
24. Consumer Confidence
25. Economies of Scale Successfully transitioning to Go
26. • Recognize what is not the same about Go • Consider adopting TDD and a methodology for learning Go • Familiarize your team with tools like PPROF to better understand more complex Go concepts • Refactor early and often • Peer Review like your life depended it on • Create opportunities for team knowledge sharing • Celebrate Economies of Scale
27. Economies of Scale