What, When, Where

Free Go Programming Language Fundamentals workshop
Saturday, December 1st, 2018
Start time: 9:00 am EST (arrive at or around 8:30 am please)
End time: 5:00 pm EST
Where: Under Armour Global HQ — 1020 Hull St, Baltimore, MD 21230 / Tide Point building

Register now if you are serious about attending — do not take someone else’s opportunity to learn.

Curriculum

As with all GoBridge workshops, we draw from excellent sources of community-written and donated teaching material while giving workshop organizers and teachers the freedom to tailor the curriculum to their local community’s needs. We do not rush through anything we teach so that you can have ample opportunity to absorb as much as possible to be able to continue your learning after the workshop.

Here is what you can expect to learn about the Go programming language during the workshop:

• Syntax and Types
• Packages
• Arrays and Iteration
• Slices
• Maps
• Pointers
• Functions
• Errors
• Interfaces
• Concurrency
• Testing
• and more

After the workshop, you will continue to have access to all the material presented, including online training sponsored by the folks at Gopher Guides.

Sponsors

Our venue is graciously donated by Under Armour (thank you Kevin and Emily). Our food and drinks are covered through the generosity of Gopher Guides.

Volunteers

We rely heavily on our volunteers to ensure all participants get the most out of the workshops. Some familiarity with Go is all you need to help participants through the material we will go through.

We will meet 15 minutes prior to the workshop starting in order to quickly go over some “do’s and don’ts” as well as some other housekeeping procedures.

2019 Outlook

As the year draws to a close, the GoBridge team is already thinking of what’s coming up early next year and how to provide as many opportunities to learn as we can to underrepresented communities within our Go ecosystem. We are always in need of teachers, volunteers, and sponsors. Ping us on twitter @GolangBridge or via email (support@golangbridge.org) if you would like to help.

For any questions about the Baltimore workshop, you can reach me on twitter @jboursiquot or via email (johnny@golangbridge.org). See you in a couple of weeks!

Upcoming Free Go Programming Workshop in Baltimore, MD on Dec 1st, 2018 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First things first: I’m not going anywhere. I am still 100% committed to the GoBridge vision and am still in the fight to bring more diversity to the tech industry, in particular, the Go community of which I’m grateful to be a part.

Now onto the matter at hand.

About a year ago Bill Kennedy, the founder of GoBridge, reached out to ask me to step up into the leadership position of the organization. After a short time thinking about it, it was a no-brainer for me. I had been involved with GoBridge since joining the Go community and saw the opportunity as another way to serve. Most importantly, it was a chance to put my time and energy where my mouth was. It was important for me to not just speak of diversity in tech but to do my part in helping to bring it about.

Fast-forward a year, my term as Lead has come to an end. During this past year, the GoBridge organization has continued to thrive, due in no small part to its volunteers, including the GoBridge Core team (present and past), those who step up to organize workshops, those who administer the channels on Gophers Slack, supportive community members, and the companies that sponsor our events and programs.

I am particularly proud that through our, now frequent, Diversity Scholarship efforts, in collaboration with diversity-conscious Go conference organizers, that we’ve been able to have several dozens of people from underrepresented groups to attend conferences that they otherwise might not have been able to. Many of those people are now part of the community and looking to open doors for others in turn. This is the kind of impact we can have in the lives of others when we come together as one, regardless of our labels.

So then, who’s taking over? I couldn’t be happier to announce that Bill Kennedy is stepping back into the role. If you know Bill, you know that he is a tireless advocate for building a diverse and inclusive community. The free workshops that he teaches around the world and the community-shepherding you see him do in places like Gophers Slack are just the visible aspects of his impact. He has a big heart and is constantly working to make things better for others. I have a ton of respect and admiration for him and I know many of you out in the community do as well. Welcome back Bill.

What’s next for me? As I mentioned in the opening, I’m still around. I will be focusing my time and energy on building a strong GoBridge Chapter in the DC/MD/VA region where I call home.

In addition, the Baltimore Go User Group has been growing steadily so that will continue to keep me busy while I also push to grow the Go community as a whole in the area.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter @jboursiquot.

Passing the torch for GoBridge Leadership was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The conference is happening on June 22nd, 2018, so that means the application submission and review process will move quickly. Applications will be accepted until Jun13th and recipients selected by June 15th, one week before the conference.

What you need to know before you apply:

• You must be part of the traditionally underrepresented at tech conferences to qualify.
• Hotel and travel are NOT covered.
• If you can make it to the DC/MD/VA area (or already live close enough to make it) and need a place to stay, we will help match you up with other gracious conference attendees willing to split a room with you.

To apply for this scholarship, please fill out the following form.

We look forward to your application and hope to see you at CapitalGo 2018 next month.

— The GoBridge Team

Diversity Scholarship for CapitalGo 2018 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

GopherCon Iceland is the first European GopherCon and is taking place May 31st through June 3rd, 2018. This is an incredible opportunity for the qualifying applicants as your ticket will cover full access to to the conference as well as one workshop of your choice.

GoBridge and Women Who Go are working to raise funds to assist those who need it with travel expenses. Keep in mind that travel assistance is not guaranteed with every diversity ticket at this point. If you require such assistance, you need to specify that when you apply.

The deadline to apply is May 15, 2018 so you better get to it.

Diversity Scholarship for GopherCon Iceland 2018 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The conference is happening in New York City on April 27th, 2018, so that means the application submission and review process will move quickly. Applications will be accepted until April 18th and recipients announced on April 20th, one week before the conference.

What you need to know before you apply:

• You must be part of the traditionally underrepresented at tech conferences to qualify.
• Hotel and travel are NOT covered.
• If you can make it to NYC (or already live close enough to make it) and need a place to stay, we will help match you up with other gracious conference attendees willing to split a room with you.

To apply for this scholarship, please fill out the following form.

We look forward to your application and hope to see you at GothamGo 2018 next month.

— The GoBridge Team

Diversity Scholarship for GothamGo 2018 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We started out with the conference organizers themselves graciously making 5 tickets available and that number quickly grew from there as more organizations and individuals stepped up to contribute to the goal of having as diverse a conference as possible.

I’m happy to announce that we will be getting 14 attendees free access to this great conference, courtesy of the following organizations and individuals:

• GothamGo
• Google
• WindMill
• Egon Elbre
• Jaana B. Dogan
• Steve Francia

Please join the GoBridge team in saying THANK YOU to these organizations and individuals. Their example inspires us to keep pushing for a more diverse and inclusive Go community. Because of them, 14 people who would have been unable to attend the conference will now be experiencing all it has to offer right alongside us.

See you at the conference!

GoBridge helps individuals from underrepresented communities attend GothamGo 2017 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

GoBridge couldn’t be happier to work with GothamGo in striving to diversify participation at a conference known for amazing technical talks and great networking opportunities.

We will be accepting Diversity Scholarship applications through September 14th and announce the winners soon after.

What you need to know before you apply:

• You must be part of the traditionally under-represented at technical conferences to qualify.
• Hotel and travel are not covered.
• If you can make it to NYC (or already live close enough to make it) and need a place to stay, we will help match you up with other gracious conference attendees willing to split a room with you.

To apply for this scholarship, please fill out the following form: https://goo.gl/forms/uq0oYhG75zHVAR382

We look forward to your application and hope to see you at GothamGo 2017 next month.

— The GoBridge Team

Diversity Scholarship for GothamGo 2017 was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Introduction

Hello! Thanks so much for reading Go Pulse. This is a new monthly newsletter made with love ❤ by the GoBridge team. Each issue will present highlights among the Go community and is curated by the month’s editor See “Editor’s Notes” below for more details.

I hope you stick around, read + appreciate the content, and eventually choose to contribute too! This newsletter is a constant work in progress and perpetually evolving. Check out our “Contributions” section on how to chat about Go Pulse with the GoBridge team.

Go Beats

Go Beats features content or projects created by gophers.

• $HOME/go
  $HOME/go will be the new default GOPATH in Go 1.8! To override it, you will need to explicitly specify $GOPATH. What a great move to help out beginners!
• Congrats Chain!
  Chain, an “enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure”, recently open sourced their code on github. They’ve also launched a Chain slack community as well as white paper documenting the protocol.
• Eliminate Stop-The-World (STW) Rescanning
  This major Go garbage collector improvement “can reduce worst-case STW time to under 50µs”. Whattttt.
• dotGo happened!
  Check out some of the talk decks in this great recap. Also, they released instructions of how they made a…. GIANT GOPHER. I would not be upset if giant gophers dominated the world. They’re dangerously cute.
• Monkey Business
  Netflix released Chaos Monkey V2.0 and guess what! Its written in Go! “Chaos Monkey is a resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.”
• TCP/IP Stack written in Go
  Thought this is pretty cool! Especially since I am currently taking a networking class and finally have enough context to understand code like this. Definitely take some time to dive in and read through the code!
• The devil is in the details
  Last and most certainly not least, Idiomatic Go identifies a handful of very useful Go best practices that help make your code cleaner & more readable.

Upcoming Event(s)

Also known as Gophers-In-Person™.

• Gophercon Brazil
  November 4–6 · Florianópolis, SC, Brazil
  “Brazil’s largest event dedicated to Go.” I’m excited to see what speaker decks / recordings come out of this! Hopefully someone will do a recap of the event.
• Women Who Go: Advanced Go Workshop — Ultimate Web
  November 5–6 · San Francisco, CA, USA
  “Ultimate Web is a 2 day class for any Go developer who wishes to learn how to build robust and well tested HTTP based applications in Go.” Honestly, any workshop co-hosted by Women Who Go is super well done and comprehensive.
• Gotham Go
  November 18 · New York City, NY, USA
  “GothamGo is a celebration of the Gopher community on the East Coast and beyond.” Hosted in NYC, this will be my first Go conference ever!
• Ultimate Go: Web Edition
  November 19–20 · New York City, NY, USA
  “Ultimate Web is a 2-day workshop for any Go developer who wants to learn how to build robust and well tested HTTP based applications in Go.” If you can’t make it to the one in SF above, here’s the same one in NYC! I’ll definitely try to stay in NYC after Gotham Go and make it to this workshop.
• Devfestnyc: Ultimate Go Training
  November 19–20 · New York City, NY, USA
  “Ultimate Go is a 2-day workshop for any intermediate-level developer who has some experience with other programming languages and wants to learn Go. It will provide an intensive, comprehensive and idiomatic view of the language.” I did this workshop in SF and learned so much. You definitely do not want to miss this workshop.
• GoLab
  January 20–21 · Prato (PO), Italy
  “GoLab is the first Italian conference on Go.” Looks like this is the second edition of this event.

Community Direction

Community Direction features non-technical content pertinent to shaping the Go community and making it better ❤

• Being an Effective Ally to Women and Nonbinary People
  I always love all the content that Etsy’s engineering blog releases. It is evident that they really care about embedding inclusivity within their company culture.
• Go Work Groups and Hardware Projects
  “JBD joined the show to talk about hardware geekery, on-boarding people into Go, the state of the feedback loop with the Go team, and her initiative to create Go Work Groups.” Thought this was pretty insightful on the process and current flaws behind how the Go team targets Go initiatives & features to work on. Its definitely important to remember that it is humans with limited bandwidth / time that work on Go. Can’t wait to see where the community goes with Work Groups.

Gopher Mic

Each week, we pass the mic to a gopher with something to share.

Open Sourcing Chain Core

By: Tess Rinearson

Last week, we took Chain Core open source. Chain Core is the first implementation, written in Go, of our protocol for a permissioned, multi-asset blockchain.

When we began working on Chain Core last year, we didn’t know that some months later we’d be open sourcing most of our work. Fortunately, we didn’t have to make too many changes to our working style before we showed our project off to the world.

Even as a closed source project, our commit style was disciplined and clean. We followed the Go project’s style of prefacing all commit messages with the primary affected package; this made it easy to understand what motivated a change, at a glance.

We also were careful about how we added commits to main, our default branch. Every pull request to main resulted in a single commit, via a healthy dose of rebasing. We used a tool we called land (as in, landing the commit onto main) to facilitate this. The latest incarnation of land is a Slack command.

So when we decided to pull back the curtains on our repository, we didn’t have to change anything about our git style.

In fact, most of the work fell into one of two categories. The first was in making sure that Chain Core was complete. We needed to make sure that our implementation thoroughly matched the Chain Protocol itself. For the first several months of development, the protocol evolved alongside our implementation, which resulted in a few small gaps in Core-Protocol parity.

We also spent a lot of time engineering the on-boarding experience. We didn’t want to just open source Chain Core; we wanted people to be able to play with it, as quickly and as easily as possible. To that end, we built a Mac app, a Windows installer, and a Docker image, which can all be downloaded from our website; and we wrote a 5-minute guide.

Smaller challenges included figuring out what parts of our codebase we didn’t want to open source. Ultimately, we open sourced a version of Chain Core that we call “Chain Core Developer Edition.” It contains all of the interesting logic and blockchain-y goodness, but reserves some of the security and scalability features that a production installation of Chain Core would require. For example, a production Chain Core should be run alongside a hardware security module, or HSM, that securely generates and stores private keys. We did not open source our HSM driver.

We’re still ironing out some of the kinks. For example, CLA Bot, which makes sure that external contributors have signed our Contributor License Agreement, took some kicking when we received our first external pull request.

If you want to play around with Chain Core, check out the project on Github, or download it directly. The Chain team can be reached through our community Slack, or on Twitter.

Editor’s Notes

Hello! You may have been wondering who the “I” is referencing throughout this newsletter. My name is Amy. I am so excited to bring Go Pulse to the Go community and hope you enjoy the content. The goal of this newsletter is to acknowledge not only the technical achievements of our fellow gophers, but to also humanize the creators behind our favorite Go tools and the language itself.

This is not an RSS feed. I have read over everything included in this newsletter and want this newsletter to feel personal.

Every Go Pulse will end with an Editor’s Notes section with some thoughts of the editor’s choosing. Editors are responsible for aiding in content curation (its not scary, the GoBridge team will help you out) and provide their perspective in the concluding Editor’s Notes. Guest editors are welcome for every edition!

Ways to Contribute

• Include funny / insightful / interesting commentary with the content you send us! We’d love to feature your social media handle next to whatever you send us.
• Be a Guest Editor!
• Send us interesting Go news/events!
• Send us non-technical content that you think would make the Go community better!
• Suggest new section themes!
• Take ownership over your very own section!
• Tweet about our newsletter!
• Send us gopher art / photos to use in the newsletter!

Check out our more extensive contribution guidelines here. We can’t wait for your PR/issue!

To unsubscribe, click on the “following” button for this Medium collection, and uncheck the letter’s checkbox. We’re sorry to see you go!

To subscribe, click on the “following” button for this Medium collection, and check the letter’s checkbox. Thanks for the read!

November 2016 — Go Pulse was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is much more than just viewing a live event. The attendees and speaker will have an experience of being together with real interactions. The platform we are using for this is BigMarker and I encourage you to test drive the tool as an admin.

GoBridge is continually looking for ways to help promote education in the Go community, especially for underrepresented groups. This is our passion and for the past year we have been helping to create local meetups, hold local workshops, and mentor individuals. We are excited about anything we can do to help grow Go adoption and best practices through education and mentoring. The idea of holding remote meetups reflects our goals and wishes for the community.

The idea is we want more people to start more meetups. You should not be restricted to just your locality on planet Earth. Think of BigMarker as your new physical location. The place where Gophers come together and interact at your meetup. This gives you the opportunity to organize a meetup and choose the topics and speakers you are most interested in hearing from. The best part, anyone from around the world can be there.

GoBridge is holding a remote meetup group and we currently have the following people scheduled to give these talks:

Carlisia Campos
GoBridge Teacher and TA Training
Sunday, May 15, 2016 · 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM · Pacific Time
https://www.bigmarker.com/remote-meetup-go/GoBridge-Teacher-and-TA-training

Vinicius Feitosa Pacheco
My First App with Go
Sunday, May 29, 2016 · 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM · Pacific Time
https://www.bigmarker.com/remote-meetup-go/Tutorial-My-First-App-with-Go

Todd McLeod
Reading Go Documentation and Web Development with Go
Thursday, June 9, 2016 · 09:00 PM · Central Time
https://www.bigmarker.com/remote-meetup-go/Reading-Go-Documentation-and-Web-Development-with-Go

Hopefully now you’re excited to hold a meetup or workshop, so how do you get started? Reach out to us and tell us what you want to do. We have helped more than several people start local meetups in the past. Once you get organized we can help you with the next steps, contact us at:

support@golangbridge.org

If you are interested in attending events, go to the BigMarker web page which is located at remotemeetup.golangbridge.org. Create an account and RSVP to the events you want to attend. We are currently lining up some amazing personalities from the Go community to give talks and as long as you stay subscribed to our channel you will be notified of new remote events. So get going!

Thanks to Compose.io, we have a Plus account that allows for up to 100 attendees to participate in any Go remote meetup or workshop. Compose offers hosted, production-ready databases — including MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PosgreSQL, RethinkDB, RabbitMQ and etcd — that can be deployed in minutes to support your team’s application development. Customers also have the option to deploy to their own AWS VPC servers.

We can’t thank Compose.io enough for the generosity in sponsoring this platform. Please show them love on social media.

This initiative is also a partnership between GoBridge and Remote Meetup (http://remotemeetup.com) to bring great Go content to a greater number and variety of people, and in the process help improve the developer community.

We hope you are as excited as we are about this new remote meetup platform. We already have some awesome people getting scheduled to offer talks. But with your help, we can schedule even more talks and build a worldwide community of remote meetups that anyone can attend. The platform is in place. Now it is up to you to step up and start that meetup you always wanted.

Originally published at medium.com on May 9, 2016.

Remote Go Meetups was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It’s been my personal experience and it is also well documented in academia, that diverse teams are more innovative, creative and adaptable in modern cultures. Diversity is strength. Diversity is longevity.”

Russ Cox in his keynote talk at GopherCon 2015 was also very clear about diversity:

“Go must be open and Go needs your help. But in fact, Go needs everyone’s help, and everyone isn’t here. Go needs ideas from as many people as possible. And to make that a reality, the Go community needs to be as inclusive, welcoming, helpful and respectful as possible.”

We are reaching out today to ask Go related user groups to become a GoBridge Parter. If you don’t have a Go user group in your region and would like to start one, we would love to help you as well.

We believe this is a great way to respond to Andrew’s and Russ’s call to action. An opportunity for everyone to get involved within their local communities. For everyone to show how inclusive, welcoming, helpful and respectful the Go community is.

If you already have an initiative with similar goals in the works, or working with a different group, that is awesome. Thanks for spending your time and talents on these issues. If there is anything we can do to help you, please let us know.

What are the advantages of supporting and growing diversity in your user group? This article on the Stanford Business blog offered this quote:

“The worst kind of group for an organization that wants to be innovative and creative is one in which everyone is alike and gets along too well.” — Margaret A. Neale

Isn’t this a goal of every user group, to be innovative, creative and expand the knowledge of everyone through learning and debate?

User groups are natural places to meet people and learn what local business are doing. An American Sociological Association study found that “for every percentage increase in the rate of racial or gender diversity up to the rate represented in the relevant population, there was an increase in sales revenues of approximately 9 and 3 percent, respectively.”

By increasing diversity in your user group and helping to grow Go adoption, your group can have a positive effect of the local economy. It all works hand in hand, but we have to be committed and do the work.

Being a GoBridge partner means you are committing yourself and the user group to providing a safe and welcoming place for everyone. You are committing to support and grow diversity and inclusion through your user group. This is what we are asking of you.

GoBridge abides by the Go code of conduct and we expect all user groups related to Go to do the same. Abiding by the code of conduct means you will work to make sure your user group helps people communicate with each other effectively, productively, and respectfully. It also means you will provide a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, religion, or similar personal characteristic.

We ask that you coordinate with our help one full day training event for any underrepresented community in your local area. You may also join forces with other groups, like we have done with Women Who Go in NYC and SF.

Expect to spend about 10 hours coordinating logistics and marketing for the event. We will help you find a sponsor to provide a space and lunch. You will also need to decide on the material you want to teach and someone who can teach it. We have course material available, and you can find out more about how to run a workshop here: https://github.com/gobridge/workshops.

We ask that you find and encourage people from these underrepresented groups to talk at your meetup. You may need to help them or provide support and we can certainly help with that as well.

This is an opportunity for everyone to get involved and work together all around the world to make Go the best community possible. It doesn’t take much but an email to GoBridge at [email protected] to get started. We hope to hear from each and every one of you.

We are an organization that enables individuals to use Go as a tool for teaching and learning programming, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, ability, economic class, age and geographical location. Our main goal is to ensure that groups of underrepresented people and people with limited access to technology have as much an opportunity to teach and learn Go as anyone else. Access to all materials, classes and time will be always free to everyone.

We are dedicated to growing and supporting local teams of individuals and industry who will have ownership in the work they do. We are also dedicated to developing in-depth and idiomatic training materials. And, even though we are working to serve local communities, there is a global community that must also benefit from the efforts.

Originally published at medium.com on January 6, 2016.

Go Needs Everyone’s Help was originally published in GoBridge Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.