GoLab 2019 – Gophers in Firenze

This year, my colleague Patrick and I had the chance to visit the GoLab 2019, an international conference about Go placed in Firenze, Italy.
Due to our addiction to Golang we were really excited to visit this developer conference.

Table of Contents

• Getting started
• Day 0
• Day 1
• Day 2

Getting started

We arrived on Saturday, one day before the conference started. Therefore we also had the chance to visit Florence. What shall we say: It’s a wonderful city with a lot of great places and friendly people.

Firenze – Photo by Heidi Kaden on Unsplash

Day 0

On Sunday the conference started with two Day 0 Workshops. Originally, we had planned to join the workshop about how to instrument and monitor Go applications.

Unfortunately, the speaker couldn’t make it to the conference so the workshop was replaced by “Performance and Scalability of Go Applications” held by Fabio Falzoi, which was also great! Fabio granted us an insight into the depths of Golang and how to gain some performance information using built-in Golang tools.

Day 1

Day 1 of the conference started on Monday morning with a very nice Keynote by Eleanor McHugh, who talked about functional programming in Go and the experiences she made with Go.

When the first talks started, we immediately noticed how hard it was to choose a topic and attend a talk because there were always three talks at the same time and all of them were interesting.

Day 2

On Tuesday, the last day of the conference started with another keynote, held by Bill Kennedy who talked about his experiences and design philosophies when creating a web service in Go.

After the keynote, the second day of the conference continued the same way the first day ended: A lot of interesting talks and many great people. We learned some really important things about several topics, like working with a message queue in Go or creating a Serverless platform.

Additionally, it was nice to meet some of the members of the Go team. For example, Katie Hockman held her talk about the functionality of Go modules and the related Proxy server combined with some funny parts about cats & dogs. With the help of these jokes, she explained how the Go modules proxy server of the dog people protects the data integrity from attacks by bad cat people.

At the end of the last conference day, Steve Francia, who is also part of the Go team, gave us an insight into the history of the Go programming language and the future of Go in his closing talk “The Legacy of Go”.
Finally, I can only say thank you to all the people who made this conference happen!

We also thank anynines for making it possible for us to attend this conference.

Cedric & Patrick