GopherCon 2024

With over 800 attendees, GopherCon 2024 brought Go enthusiasts and professionals from around the world to Chicago, creating an atmosphere buzzing with innovation and camaraderie. It was an exhilarating experience filled with groundbreaking talks, collaborative events, and exciting demos. Contributing to the celebration were Sam and Cassie Coyle - identical twins and both talented software engineers, at Diagrid, building the open-source Dapr project along with tools and services to make distributed app development quicker and easier. In this blog we’ll share their highlights from the conference, along with some of what they got up to.

Organizing the Women Who Go and Meta-Meetup events

Cassie and Sam were behind both the Women Who Go event, as well as the Meetup for Meetup Organizers, emphasizing their personal efforts towards diversity and inclusion efforts in the technical community. Both events provided a warm introduction to GopherCon, enabling a setting for networking, sharing knowledge, and fostering a sense of community among attendees. Everyone at Diagrid is involved with open-source software, and we love to engage with the community and share our values.

Mainstage & Breakouts

The technical sessions at GopherCon 2024 covered a wide array of topics, each contributing to the collective advancement of the Go community.

Cassie, a Dapr contributor, presented to the entire conference audience on the topic of Standardizing Errors in Go: A Practical Guide With Dapr,  igniting discussions about Dapr and Diagrid's contributions to the ecosystem as well as sparking collaboration on a new Dapr debugging capability. 

Given that Dapr operates in a distributed environment, which is inherently complex, this approach to error handling is particularly important to Dapr users. The presentation showcased a new open source package developed to enrich errors to lean towards being empathetic to users, offering a solution of the error standardization across all APIs within Dapr, which is an ongoing engineering effort. The presentation also covered an overview of the Pub/Sub API as an example illustrating a before and after an enriched error using the errors package, generating considerable interest and emphasizing the practical applications and benefits of Dapr in modern software development, especially within the Go community. This errors package, found in the dapr/kit Github repository, is built using the builder pattern to construct the errors in a step-by-step way, enhancing errors with the relevant error details following the richer error model.

Some of the many breakout sessions that Cassie and Sam enjoyed:

Cryptography State of the Union: This talk delved into the latest advancements in cryptography, including the introduction of post-quantum algorithms in the crypto/tls package. The math/rand package is now secure from version 1.22 onwards. The x/crypto/ssh package, previously not well-maintained, has been updated. Additionally, many deprecated security packages have been cleaned up, removing confusion and highlighting fully supported and maintained packages.

Bubble Tea CLIs: There was notable interest in creating command-line interfaces using the Bubble Tea framework, with the community still exploring the capabilities of Generics. This is directly applicable to our own CLI that leverages a prompting experience with Bubble Tea where we were able to draw many corollaries to this presentation.

Go-MQTT Package in Africa: The consumption of the Go-MQTT package in Africa was highlighted, showcasing the global contributions from the Go ecosystem and the amazing impact that it can have. This talk coveredhighlighted saving the Savannah wildlife through the usehelp of this package to help prevent illegal poaching going on in the area.

Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Package: A new package for creating digital audio compositions entirely in Go was introduced, demonstrating the language's versatility. Many Diagridian’s are musically inclined, so this was a special treat to learn about and share internally.

pgtestdb: This package promises lightning-fast database tests, significantly improving testing workflows. We plan to investigate this package to potential leverage internally in our own tests.

prontoGUI: A new graphical user interface package, prontoGUI, was unveiled, offering developers more options for building user interfaces in Go.

Ngrok's Infrastructure Retrospective: Ngrok presented a retrospective on their 10-year journey, focusing on error standardization at the API level and the importance of 24/7 end-to-end tests to identify issues before they affect customers. This signifies the ongoing efforts for error standardization that Dapr is pursuing is particularly important and significant, as it proved beneficial to Ngrok in their journey. Also, at Diagrid we put a significant importance on our end-to-end testing efforts for our products, and run nearly constant end-to-end tests as well. This was encouraging to hear the value Ngrok received in these endeavors, and we are excited to see them pay off for us similarly!

Sam - author of “Go Programming From Beginner to Professional”

Sam’s latest book, Go Programming - From Beginner to Professional, was very popular at the event, as a raffle prizes at the Women Who Go event,  Challenge Series, and a final conference book signing event where she personalized each recipient's book with an individual note. The Twins also met the organizer of GopherCon Nairobi in Kenya, Africa, and Sam signed copies of her textbook to be used as raffle prizes for the first ever GopherCon in Africa. This just goes to show the global reach, inclusivity, and constant learning-mindset of the Go community.

We love GopherCon!

Based on the reactions of attendees, GopherCon 2024 was a resounding success, showcasing the vibrant and ever-evolving Go community. Diagrid is proud to be part of this community, contributing to its growth and innovation. The insights and collaborations from this conference will undoubtedly help to shape the future of Go development, and we look forward to continuing our journey with the incredible Gophers we met along the way.

Stay tuned for more updates and innovations from Diagrid as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with Go. We look forward to seeing all the smiling faces at GopherCon 2025 with even more from Dapr and Diagrid!