Cup o' Go

Jonathan and Shay talk about the show itself; a bit of context and history, what they like, what they don't like, and how it will change in the future.

The main thing is it's still a short, focused, Go news program! But we discuss ways to improve it and increase its reach.

Shoutout to My First Million's episode: "We hit record on our private strategy session" for the idea.
ā˜… Support this podcast on Patreon ā˜…

Creators and Guests

Host
Jonathan Hall
Freelance Gopher, Continuous Delivery consultant, and host of the Boldly Go YouTube channel.
Host
Shay Nehmad
Engineering Enablement Architect @ Orca
Editor
Filippo Valvassori BolgĆØ
Sound Designer / Audio Editor based in Milan

What is Cup o' Go?

Stay up to date with the Go community in about 15 minutes per week

Jonathan Hall:

This show is supported by you. Don't stick around till later to hear about that. We're not gonna talk about it at all on this episode. What? This is Cup o' Go for Thursday, 07/02/2026.

Jonathan Hall:

Keep up to date. Wait. No. Don't do that. Don't keep up to date with anything.

Jonathan Hall:

We're not talking about anything Go related today. We're just talking about the show. This is our meta episode. I'm Jonathan Hall.

Shay Nehmad:

And I'm Shay Nehmad. This is Yeah. What you look

Jonathan Hall:

It's great to see you.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. And I also hear you. Well, we'll see about that. Happy two fifty Independence Day. USA one against Bosnia two zero.

Shay Nehmad:

I watched that in San Pedro Square with, all the American soccer fans. Cool. That was a ton

Jonathan Hall:

All three of them? They were all there?

Shay Nehmad:

The square was packed, but I can tell you nobody is a soccer fan because they don't know any of the chance. They don't like they just know how to go like, you, say, you, say.

Jonathan Hall:

Well, that's all you need,

Shay Nehmad:

isn't I'm talking about the World Cup. I suddenly realized I'm talking this is like a programmer podcast, so

Jonathan Hall:

maybe people

Shay Nehmad:

don't even know the World Cup is happening. But yeah, I watched the World Cup. That was a lot of fun. And I live in San Jose where there's a huge Hispanic population and I watched the Mexico game the day before. That was pretty good as well.

Jonathan Hall:

When I lived in Mexico fifteen years ago, one day, I guess the World Cup was happening. I didn't realize the World Cup was happening because I'm a programmer, but I was sitting there working one day and I started to hear people screaming around, like, outside in the neighborhood, what's going on? And then thirty minutes later, happened again. Turned out Mexico had scored during the World Cup, and people were watching it on TV.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. It was probably sixteen years ago because it happens in four year, probably.

Jonathan Hall:

Probably was. Yeah. Probably was sixteen years years ago. Ago.

Shay Nehmad:

Anyway, why are we not doing Go news this episode?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I'm I'm so tired of Go. I thought we could switch to maybe Rust news or Python news.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. That'd be good. We decided to see a c 99 op. Bringing you everything that's new in C99.

Jonathan Hall:

That's right. That's right. We decided it was time to take stock a little bit of our show, what we're getting out of it personally, what the community might be getting out of it, see if there's anything we can improve, change. Yeah. So this is gonna be sort of our own live well, I guess not live by the time you listen to it, but unscripted brainstorming session about what we might or might not do with the podcast going forward.

Jonathan Hall:

To set anybody at ease, you might be worried. We're not planning to cancel it. That's not the concern. It's not like we're getting burned out. That's not the thing.

Shay Nehmad:

Not because we want

Jonathan Hall:

see if we can make it better. Yeah. We're burned out for the reason.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. And I wanna shout out a podcast that I don't really like called My First Million. Yeah. So I don't know. Shout out to those guys because even though I don't like the name and I don't like the concept, we listened.

Shay Nehmad:

You send me like, oh, an episode that's called we had recorded our private strategy strategy session, which is sort of what we're copying here. Like they talked

Jonathan Hall:

about Exactly.

Shay Nehmad:

This is what we like about the podcast, this is what we don't like about the podcast. But we are, both of us, sort of cursed with the curse of knowledge because we have done this show over the last three point five years and a 163 episodes. So I think we should, like, take stock of what we've done so far other than the fact that the show has been running almost for four years and for over a 160 episodes at this point. So if someone is like listening to this strategy session and they wanna voice their opinion, and some people have already in the channel, which I love and we'll get to that. Thanks, Miki, Nicolas, and Andy.

Shay Nehmad:

But I want to, like, sort of understand what is this show? What have we done so far? How do you feel about what we've done so far? What's the impact? What you felt?

Shay Nehmad:

So so give me, like, if you if you had to give a recap of Cup o' Go to someone, like a pitch or whatever, how would you do that?

Jonathan Hall:

Those those are different to me. A recap Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

I mean, not a recap. Not a pitch, like a sales pitch. Like Okay. You know, you're you're speaking to someone over coffee at five minutes, and they're asking you, what's this show? What is it all about?

Shay Nehmad:

Like, what have you done so far, So

Jonathan Hall:

I would describe it as I had the idea for this podcast based on we've talked about this on the show a few times, so longtime listeners, don't tune out. We'll talk about new stuff in a moment. But I had the idea when I was co organizing the Amsterdam Go meetup when I lived there, and we introduced a section called what's new in Go with a rule that no single person could do the same presentation twice. And it was a way to encourage people to speak for the first time, possibly ever, but at least at our meetup, and with a format that was easy to copy. So that was kind of the idea there.

Jonathan Hall:

You know, just go see what the late release notes are and talk about your favorite thing that happened in Go or a proposal that's coming out or or a conference that's coming up or whatever, you know? So I decided to go, that's a fairly easy format for a podcast. I had done podcasts before, but I wanted to do another one and I wanted to do one about Go. So I thought that sounds like an easy concept. Doesn't require a huge amount of prep.

Jonathan Hall:

You know, I don't have to go research some in-depth thing to give a tutorial or whatever I might other format I might have chosen.

Shay Nehmad:

Find depth, in-depth interviews or, like, investigative journalism.

Jonathan Hall:

Right. Right. And so then so that that was where the that's where I got the concept. I put out a call. I think it was in the Ryan's leadership, the ship Slack, and they go

Shay Nehmad:

to Shout out Ryan's leadership. Great community.

Jonathan Hall:

I was thinking like, hey. I I sort of said, who who would be interested in doing this with me? And you reached out. That was how we met. So, yeah, thanks Shay for reaching out.

Jonathan Hall:

It's been fun so far.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. And at the beginning, we did our first, like, sort of pilot pilot episode. To me, it it meant me at a really good time because I was, like, engineering manager, VPR and D sort of situation, and I really wanted to stay sharp. I felt like I was starting to lose my edge with the amount of people I was managing and, like, just, you know, the the pie of my time. Because I used to be the guy who like reads every git release notes and knows all the commands and whatever.

Shay Nehmad:

But obviously as you move up in engineering management and you manage leads of leads and you have to hire a lot of people and whatever, especially still in early startup life, you don't get that time. You just If you don't make it, you don't get it. Your extra time goes to other things. Yeah. Aligning stakeholders and writing performance reviews, which is all important and really fun, I enjoy that work a lot.

Shay Nehmad:

I just felt like I was kinda losing my edge. Mhmm. And then I saw this opportunity, I was like, oh, perfect. We use Go. I really like Go.

Shay Nehmad:

And very coincidentally, I also have a good microphone, which I didn't buy for the podcast. I actually bought it for my recording studio when I was like 14 and I thought I would be a musician. But I was like, hey, I have a really good microphone and I'm like not using it. And I loaned it to a friend who wanted to do a podcast and he did like one episode and then he stopped. But he was like, man, this microphone is really good.

Shay Nehmad:

I'm like, I know, right? So that all worked out pretty, pretty well on that regard. And since then, we've done the pilot episode and the pilot episode had like a very, like normal structure. We wrote down, I think it was Google Docs at the time, what would we wanna talk about in that episode. And then we sort of traded off like me telling you about a thing.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

And you reacting on the thing, where I have to learn more deeply about it and you sort of learn it live, like in me at DRS together with the listeners. And then you do one thing, like you teach me about a proposal and I'll read a blog post and I'll talk to you about it. And I think this is a format that could have really bombed. It could have been really bad if we didn't have good, like, chemistry. We're, like, pretty similar and we know how to riff and we actually listen and we try to learn these these things.

Shay Nehmad:

Some episodes we didn't really listen to one another, then we just read a laundry list and Yeah. We'll get to the future looking things in the moment, but in a in a moment, but these are like episodes I like less. Yeah. And then we had an interview after the news part where we bring on some other Gopher and we like, you know, dive deep into their whatever. Open source they're working on or company that they're working at or whatever they wanna talk about at the time, blog posts they wrote or something like that.

Shay Nehmad:

We've probably had like almost a 100 interviewees at this point, right? We're 150 I episodes.

Jonathan Hall:

Count, but yeah, probably so.

Shay Nehmad:

So that's a lot of people. And I don't think we've had the same person twice yet. We may have.

Jonathan Hall:

Is interview is an interview probably not, but some interviewees have come back as cohosts to fill in when one of us was gone.

Shay Nehmad:

I'm getting at is we we we tend to cover quite a lot of different things in the Go world. Some things are repeats and people really like, like the Go proposals is really interesting because it shows really how the language evolves. The Go, you know, major version episodes, like everything you need to know about version whatever have always been a huge hit because I feel even people who don't really listen to the show, it's a good, like on a weekly basis because they just don't care about Go to that level or they can listen to that episode and it's like information dense. Yeah. And as we've done the show, we've evolved it, I think a little bit.

Shay Nehmad:

Mostly we've gotten an editor that saved up a lot of time. We've improved on the format a little bit with, you know, the stumper questions and the lighting round and we've played around with some things, but generally it stayed the same. Like the point of the show was for us both to learn and be better Go developers or just developers, whatever, and also have a cool podcast. You know what I That comes with a lot of benefits as we've discovered last month, right?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I wanna I wanna do just a quick overview of the analytics since we're talking about what's happened in the past. Think that's

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, that that'll be really good. I haven't I haven't, like, dove into that in a while. This is gonna be, you know, very unorthodox for us, but do you wanna share your screen because we're recording Good

Jonathan Hall:

idea.

Shay Nehmad:

Right? Right?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

That'll make it for a good, like, social media, you know, sort of

Jonathan Hall:

I'll be sure to still talk about what I'm showing for those who aren't listening, aren't watching, but yes, I This will share my

Shay Nehmad:

is still primarily an audio show. But one of the things I think both of us are are itching to explore is also video format.

Jonathan Hall:

Let me figure out how to share my screen. Don't know. I think I've done it once in this.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, I just turned the

Jonathan Hall:

video off. That's not it. Here it is.

Shay Nehmad:

In this, clip, we see a Linux user trying to deal with video drivers.

Jonathan Hall:

I see a fucking

Shay Nehmad:

Five minutes later. A few moments later. Now that we're on video, by the way, this has changed. Like, when videos off and we do the show and I'm not fully paying attention, which I it doesn't happen a lot, but sometimes happens, I would, like, use this. I would, like, type while we're talking.

Shay Nehmad:

But because we're on video right now, I gotta keep my hands the same. Using this, like, this hand cranky thingy

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

To to make your hands stronger, and I think my wrists are gonna fall off by the end of this episode. Okay. So what do the numbers show?

Jonathan Hall:

So first, I wanna just look at the the first episode. The the release window, I think it's is that three days? Days one and two. So our first episode had a 193 listeners in the first two days, which which already blew my mind. Based on my experience with my previous podcast, I was thinking, like, if I got a 100 listeners per episode, that'd be pretty cool.

Jonathan Hall:

So I more than doubled my expectation in the first two days of releasing the first episode.

Shay Nehmad:

I was really surprised too. And I don't remember, like, obviously we've said this before, we've never paid to advertise, but I don't even remember like pushing it this hard. I wasn't embarrassed about it and I think I was really proud of but what we've I didn't, push it as, oh my god, I'm a podcaster now. It was just, a thing, I did. I sent the link on LinkedIn, think, and on Rance

Jonathan Hall:

maybe. I'm sure I I put it on LinkedIn, probably Rand's, probably my daily I had a daily email this Yeah. Twitter. Yeah. The social regular socials.

Jonathan Hall:

I do remember early on. I don't remember which episode it was, but early on, the Go A Ling Weekly newsletter, within the first couple of months, I think, mentioned us. So that got us some listener share. But the main point I wanna make it here is just, like, right out of the gate, it surpassed all of my expectations, and it just grew. I mean, it it is not all not every episode is more popular than the next or than the previous, but the the trend is clearly upward.

Shay Nehmad:

It's been incredibly consistent Yeah. Which I liked. Like, the fact that I know Well, maybe this episode will be really different, because I think hardcore listeners would listen and a lot of people would just drop. But on a normal episode, to know that at least, like, let's say, you know, the numbers here say, you know, right now our release windows look like around 800 people, whatever the like, what are the latest episodes showing on the release window?

Jonathan Hall:

This estimates

Shay Nehmad:

Close to a thousand on on, like, Yeah. The I first 100

Jonathan Hall:

in the first week. Over a almost 1,100 in the first thirty days per episode. So yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

So let's say a thousand people download it. I would say maybe that means that a 100 people actually listened. You know, they were, like, doing something that's, like, doing the dishes or going to the gym or whatever, but, you know, they were actually listening. Because I know I've I've listened to a lot of other podcasts myself, and I couldn't really tell you what they were, saying. You know, it's a news podcast or a whatever pop culture podcast or just a funny, like, comedy podcast or whatever, even, tech or investing or other things I'm interested in.

Shay Nehmad:

But I would say about one to 10 episodes that I consume, I could actually talk about because they were interesting enough, even if it's the same show. But still a 100 people every week who actually listen out of like a thousand that download it, that's Mhmm. A huge number. Can you imagine giving a lecture to a 100 people every week?

Jonathan Hall:

Every week.

Shay Nehmad:

I was so nervous about giving a lecture to what? At Genentech, it was like two fifty people?

Jonathan Hall:

Uh-huh.

Shay Nehmad:

That's like an episode, basically. It's just because this format is like slightly more friendly because you and I just talk and there people listen to it async. But I don't know. That's a lot.

Jonathan Hall:

Here on the screen, also show just the overall month by month listenership. So if you can't see, I'll just describe generally. The first month, which was January 2023, we had just under 1,000 listens for the month. Our peak month was May 2025 with almost 8,300, and we've been we haven't quite hit that again, but we've been trending kind of in that direction. So I don't know.

Jonathan Hall:

This might be a plateau. You know, maybe we've reached our audience. But even if that's the case, it's it's it's a great audience. So, you know, I don't know if there's much room to to grow. Maybe there is.

Jonathan Hall:

Maybe we'll talk about that later in Zynziq.

Shay Nehmad:

Reached our audience like we've saturated it, like there aren't any more Go developers.

Jonathan Hall:

Maybe this is the number of Go developers who like to listen to news podcasts, or maybe it's not, and just need to find new ways to reach them, if we can.

Shay Nehmad:

That's an interesting question. Like, I never thought about our growth as a target, although it's always been reaffirming to see. Yeah. But I will say that over this time period that you might look at it and say, that's not a lot of growth, we did add like Patreon and stuff like that. So people have been and people have been engaging in the channel, I feel more and more.

Shay Nehmad:

So I do feel like some other numbers are up. I don't think we're saturated. Like there's no way that there are only a thousand Go developers who also like podcasts and also might jive with our, format and speak English pretty well. Like Yeah. I I don't think there are a million of those people, but I don't think there are only a thousand.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. You're probably right. And we can talk about if we should try to reach out to them as the episode continues. So anyway, I think that's enough about analytics. I guess one last number, we've had 219,300 and total downloads, almost 220,000.

Jonathan Hall:

So that's kind of almost a quarter million. We'll we'll hit that before the year's over, I'm sure.

Shay Nehmad:

That's crazy. That's a lot. Although, you know, we've always said when we mentioned analytics that it's nice to talk about, but, podcast analytics are, like, notoriously difficult to track. They're

Jonathan Hall:

very guessy.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Although that, honestly, that feels, reasonable to me just with the amount of things that have happened that these numbers seem to make sense. Sure. So this is the podcast so far, right? A 160 episodes in, we met a ton of people, other notable achievements other than these numbers, I think, would be just the interesting conversations that we've had with, our interviewees.

Shay Nehmad:

To me personally, the Genentech conference was a really, like, big celebration of the of our like, you and I as post podcast hosts and not just the individuals who know about Go. Mhmm. Really a lot of people there treated us as like, oh, they they are the Go podcast people, so they must be Go experts or not, oh, we bought Go experts who also maybe have a podcast. Yeah. And also personally moving I moved to the SF Bay Area and having the podcast gave me a really good leapfrog on meeting people here, networking, and actually getting to meet people who were, like, were on the show or in Slack or whatever, but it did give me a lot of personal, like, sort of brand recognition, which is really cool and not, again, not a side effect I expected.

Shay Nehmad:

I just wanted to do this to, be better at Go, but I think I And I definitely feel that you have become better at podcasting as like a thing. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

What what we wanna talk about is what do we wanna change. Right?

Jonathan Hall:

Yes. That's what we've written up. I actually wonder if we should spend a couple minutes talking about what we don't wanna change or should we let that come in naturally as we talk about things?

Shay Nehmad:

I just want you to tell me what you want to change in the show or what do you because I feel we both It's been almost four years of the same format. Just for our sort of sake, we should probably shake things up. But also I think we can make the show better. I legitimately think we can make it better. Not incrementally, like by introducing some, you know, not like, oh, let's take on average two minutes off the news and add the two minutes to an interview on average or something like that.

Shay Nehmad:

Like some, you know, major changes.

Jonathan Hall:

So on that on that note, I think the biggest thing that we could do to improve the podcast probably is to add video, which we're we're, of course, experimenting with today. We did one episode with video.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. That was live. We celebrated, like, one year or two years of the show or something like that.

Jonathan Hall:

It was the episode with Elliot, wasn't it?

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Yeah. That was I think it was just the interview, though.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, you're probably right. Yeah. Because he wanted to put it on his YouTube channel.

Shay Nehmad:

By the way, Elliot at Dreams of Code. Great, great guy. Yeah. It was a fun episode. What's up, Elliot?

Shay Nehmad:

I hope you're listening.

Jonathan Hall:

So anyway, back to the point. I think that adding video would be a big benefit because of the world we live in. A lot of people like to watch their podcasts on YouTube. And even with the people who don't, you know, it's nice sometimes to have the YouTube on in the background, even if you're not watching it closely, if you're doing the dishes or something at the same time. So I do think that we would that would be one way to probably expand our listenership.

Jonathan Hall:

And I also do think it does open it up to other types of content that we haven't done before, like sharing statistics on the screen or whatever, as long as we're Or

Shay Nehmad:

very importantly sharing code. You know what I mean? This is a this is a show fundamentally about a programming language. And I think about the way I interact with programming. I read code or write code in an IDE or in an agent interface, whatever.

Shay Nehmad:

But that's like the main way I interface with these stuff. Right? I read blogs, I read it's a lot of text, or And in some

Jonathan Hall:

these things are really hard to explain verbally. So that doesn't mean we'll stop trying if we go with video. We'll still try to keep it an audio friendly format. But for those who want to see the video, I do think it could add a lot.

Shay Nehmad:

Okay. So what you're saying is you wanna add video and then you mentioned like the things you want to change is maybe make it a bit more engaging, maybe make it a bit easier to explain like certain concepts and also increase the listenership.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

So I wanna, agree with you that I think we can get, what we wrote that we prepped ahead of time for this, on our own, we had like a little homework. It was things we wanna add, things we wanna remove, how do we want the show's like brand to evolve and what we wanna get out of this personally. Other than hanging out with you, which is cool, what do we wanna get out of the show and maybe how has that changed over time? So I think our brand is very like still, oh, we're that new show that, you know, we just got started and everything's casual and whatever. And a lot of podcasts I listen to, even if they're more jokey, comedy, like nonsense shows, they come off as like being way more of a thing.

Shay Nehmad:

Like the podcast is is is a thing, like a brand within of itself. Mhmm. And not just the the content. And I feel like we're missing on that a little bit. Like that we're like lightweight, jokey, professional, technical, efficient.

Shay Nehmad:

It's like an efficient show. It's not a four hour slog that you have to listen to. It's like short. I think everybody appreciates that it's short. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

But you know, other other podcasts, they have like, a network behind them or sponsors or recommendations or whatever. And I feel like we're missing out on that and that could help us get to more people, which I would want, and also just make the show a little bit more of a thing. First of what I'm trying to get at is I think video is is one example of making the show look and and behave more like a show and not just you and I talking and accidentally recording it on what, like, what happened in Go this week.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

Because if I'll be on camera and I have to share my screen, I have to prepare a little bit more than just opening up all the tabs and reading for it. And I think people will feel like the show is more serious. Even though we're not like opening an LLC or hiring more employees, we have like our editor, but we're not hiring like a social media manager and a script writer and whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Let me go delete those off my notes then.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. We're not like expanding this as a business, but I think adding video will sort of force us to take it a bit more seriously.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

And then it just means the content will be better for whomever's listening. Like, we add video, I think the audio, listeners will enjoy it more as well.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it. All

Shay Nehmad:

right. So that's that's one thing I totally agree with. We'll have to figure out how to do it though. Like, we can upload obviously, we upload the entire episode to YouTube today as well, right, as audio.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. It's already on YouTube. It has been for a couple of years, but it's audio only with just a still image.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. So we can add, like, the video on top, maybe. I don't know how expensive that would be to, like, edit alongside the audio, maybe not too much.

Jonathan Hall:

I think the main cost will be, paying Filippo more hours Yeah. To edit the video because video editing video editing?

Shay Nehmad:

Edit that out. No. I'm just kidding.

Jonathan Hall:

Video editing is is much more time consuming.

Shay Nehmad:

I see next thing on your list is more social media presence. One thing I wanna steal right out of the, whatever million, My First Million podcast is we don't do short short form content and I've like debated internally with myself. I don't like when I consume short form. Do you do that like Instagram reels or YouTube Shorts

Jonathan Hall:

or TikTok or I do YouTube Shorts occasionally. Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel

Shay Nehmad:

about yourself when you do that?

Jonathan Hall:

It's to kill the time. It's usually when I'm waiting for something or sitting on the pot. So I don't feel like it's a big waste of time because I'm not doing anything valuable anyway.

Shay Nehmad:

It's

Jonathan Hall:

Although there not happen times when I sit there and just sort of scroll, I'm like, oh man, wasted half an hour, that was stupid.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. That happens to me, unfortunately, more than I'd like to admit. Like me, you know, I wouldn't be able to fall asleep or whatever and I'll be like, I'll just scroll down fall asleep and then suddenly forty five minutes pass and I'm like, oh man, like what just happened to me? And a lot of the time, it's not, I don't know, like, my feed, and I hate that word, you know, it shows me some things that are actually interesting and I'm interested in, like, you know, basketball stuff or whatever, like sports or science stuff, or even programming. Like, it'll show me, snippets of of other podcasts talking about, programming.

Shay Nehmad:

But a lot of the time it's just trash. I I'm in in like split minds about this. I think a lot of people will discover our show if we create short form content and we're like,

Jonathan Hall:

oh,

Shay Nehmad:

now you can listen to the entire podcast just by going to Cup o' Go. And I think a one minute snippet of us explaining a proposal is valuable within of itself. Like our show sort sort of lends itself to at least the simpler news items, like, oh, have you heard that Go is, getting rid of the four loop thing a thing? Oh, what is the four loop thing a thing? Tack, tack, tack, tack.

Shay Nehmad:

So Go one twenty six. That could be great short form content that's actually useful and valuable, but it's still, like, in a in the feed, which I I generally dislike. Like, I wouldn't allow my kid to access a a scrolling endless video feed until she's, like, at least nine and ideally, you know, very supervised because I think it's really bad for your brain. So I don't know how I feel about that and I wanted to sort of debate this with you.

Jonathan Hall:

All right. So two things I want to say first about what I mean by social media presence. One is short form video content. I think that would be a great way to like, there are two great things about it. One is new exposure to new listeners, and the other is, like you said, I do think a lot of our content is valuable in short form.

Jonathan Hall:

I mean, we it's already a short program by design. Chopping it into know, chopping 15 of news. No. But chopping fifteen minutes of news into 15 one minute segments, in theory, is valuable. You know, you could you could while you're doom scrolling, you can learn about that new proposal that's coming out or whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

So, yeah, that that is valuable, and it's and it's more valuable than the random, you know, comedy clips about your ex girlfriend or whatever you might might see otherwise. But I also think that there's room for text based social media, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, whatever. You know, every one of our news articles could also be a one paragraph news article that we could post on social media. And for people who either don't want to listen to a podcast because but they'd rather read it in their Twitter feed, the same content could easily be put there, at least in theory. We figure have to figure out how to do it, but I I don't think we have to limit ourselves to audio or audio video.

Jonathan Hall:

I think the same stuff we're presenting could be probably with AI, we could have AI turn it into little, tweets or whatever.

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. I I I agree. I I feel like we're not, using social media to its fullest and No, definitely not, yeah. The the only thing I'll say again that I I gotta I I gotta keep in mind for myself, and when we do this is that we don't want to, like, generate clicks for the for the show. Like, that's not a goal.

Shay Nehmad:

We want people to discover the show and then decide if they like it or not, and we want to, you know, work with how people are are listening. So if people actually are listening in like one in ninety seconds, of like video and they can't really do anymore or, you know, they prefer to read. Like, we would like to meet more people where they are versus just saying, like, this is our show. This is the only format you'll be ever get it in and whatever. Right.

Shay Nehmad:

And it's become manageable for just us to using AI, right? Because we we could do that pretty cheaply, also with the platforms we're using. Like, there are options to do that with the tooling we have right now. It also connects pretty well what you what you said to like my my surprise idea, which I'll keep for slightly later. But yeah, I don't I don't again, like with the YouTube shorts thing or whatever feed, I don't like using social media too much.

Shay Nehmad:

I use LinkedIn mostly for work, like, because I work at a company and I wanna promote the company I work at and what do we do and our customers live there. And I sort of regrettably use X still, formerly known as Twitter, but I'm off all the other ones. But just the fact that this is how these platforms make me feel doesn't mean that someone that uses Instagram, for example, that I've never used before. I literally I probably have an account because I have a Facebook account, but I've never used it before. Like, maybe there's someone you know, I have a lot of musician friends and they really enjoy using Instagram because a lot of musicians post their stuff there and it's really cool.

Shay Nehmad:

I I the point I'm trying to make is we should post there to meet our audience where they are in a way that's useful to them and not to generate clicks. And I really don't want us to become these YouTubers with crazy thumbnails and clickbaity, you know. We sometimes do clickbait like tongue in cheek. We'll have to tone that down if we actually do social media. Like, I wouldn't want our, you're never gonna believe what Go one twenty six is whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Yeah. I got it. Right.

Shay Nehmad:

So so we gotta be respectful to do that, but I

Jonathan Hall:

do want

Shay Nehmad:

to do that.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I think this is a good place to call out. It's on the end of my list, but I think it's relevant to mention here. And it and it ties into why, at least for me, we haven't done video before. And that is I want this program to still be low stress, low maintenance.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm. I don't want this I don't want this to be a you know, I don't want to have to spend eight hours a week on social media management and editing video clips and and click farming or whatever. You know? It needs to be easy and low stress, or I'm not gonna wanna do it. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

I was gonna say the only way I could be motivated to do that is if it starts making me money. And I don't really want this to make me money because I don't want that motivation involved. I want it to remain a community effort, if it makes sense.

Shay Nehmad:

So this is a great this is a great segue to what do you want out of the show. For me, it remained like staying top of the game in Go. It's become harder over time because I don't do Go in production a lot right now, just because my startup So doesn't use most of my programming hours are in different tech stacks. So personally, this hasn't changed. Like, I still want to learn about Go because a lot of the time the things I learn about Go are still relevant.

Shay Nehmad:

You know, oh, the Go language is introduced in the standard library, FIPS. And then I know what FIPS is, and then that's totally relevant if I talk to a government customer in my, in my startup, I can bring up FIPS and be like, oh, FIPS is interesting, do you whatever. And like, I'm knowledgeable about it, even though I'm not necessarily deploying FIPS compliant Go software right now. You know what I mean? Right.

Shay Nehmad:

That hasn't changed for me. How did have you, like, changed your opinion about, like, the learning aspect personally for you? This is what you wanna gain out of the show?

Jonathan Hall:

I don't think so.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. I feel like it's been good. And also it worked. Like, legitimately, I learned

Jonathan Hall:

a I learned a ton during the show. And, you know, like learning, you know, the episode we had about pips was great. Like, I I would have had no idea. Like, I would have thought, that's that crypto thing, certification stuff. Now I have a much stronger sense.

Jonathan Hall:

I still don't use it. But when people are talking about it, don't feel like I don't feel like they're talking about football. Feel like they're talking about something I understand.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. But, personally, for me, I wouldn't want the show to make me money directly, but I would like, I I don't know if the Genentech thing was a one off. I feel like it's not. I feel like I can get more speaking positions as the Go podcast Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I mean, as a as a essentially freelance software developer, I have no problem finding clients. I have found a couple of clients through the podcast. I think that's great. Speaking engagements, stuff like that.

Jonathan Hall:

You know? But that's that's more like building cred, industry cred. I don't wanna monetize the show directly.

Shay Nehmad:

That was exactly the point I was trying to We don't wanna make money off the show and therefore I don't really wanna invest a ton of time. Like I can do eight hours a week on the show and like spend all my extra time editing stuff and trying to do marketing and social media and whatever or, you know, even preparing not just like marketing, even just really, really, really preparing and learning every proposal down to its last business and cloning every branch and trying it on my machine and whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

But

Shay Nehmad:

that will come at a The show won't be low stress anymore. I'll have to like make it work, quote unquote.

Jonathan Hall:

Right.

Shay Nehmad:

And for me, it's not even like you where you're freelance and you have more control of your time. I have like a full time job. I really wouldn't be able to make it a high stress sort of thing. Even though if I focus just on the Go stuff, I'll probably know Go a little better. It's just not justifiable.

Shay Nehmad:

So we gotta be able to introduce these changes in a sustainable way.

Jonathan Hall:

Exactly. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

And also this is fun. This is like legitimately fun. So I don't want to Yeah. It needs I look forward to it. It is.

Shay Nehmad:

I wouldn't want to be like, oh, man.

Jonathan Hall:

But it needs to remain fun. And I know myself well enough that when I see something new, like, I've done the YouTube shorts before for other content and it's fun to do. Yeah. I've done you used to watch some of my Bold to Go shorts. Know you told me.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. So you go, that's fun to do for a while.

Shay Nehmad:

And then

Jonathan Hall:

once I

Shay Nehmad:

thought I

Jonathan Hall:

mean is

Shay Nehmad:

we haven't done it for a couple of

Jonathan Hall:

I haven't done it this. I'm just saying that personally, I've done it before on other types of content, and I've enjoyed it to a point. And then it gets to that point where it's not learning anymore and it becomes a slog. And then I don't wanna keep doing it. I don't want that to happen for this show.

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So I have a suggestion of a thing to remove.

Shay Nehmad:

Okay. Laundry lists. So my whole thing when I thought a lot about the podcast was I really enjoy like, the deepest satisfaction and enjoyment, I guess, is when we go deep on something. Mhmm. Like the everything you need to know about 126 episodes or, 120 whatever episodes.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Or a really deep interview with someone where we get really deep and sometimes a lot of that stuff gets left on the like editing room floor. But when people really open up or they teach me something really cool, like that DNA Go thing episode, I tell people about that all the time. Like, this is my canonical example of why I like doing the show. I was like, man, I didn't even know that DNA encoding in software was a thing.

Shay Nehmad:

I didn't know it was And lo and behold, some random dude comes comes on my show and teaches me for an hour not only how to do it, but also all the current problems in it and also how to solve it and go with JSON. That's like awesome. Yeah. So or the live episodes. Live episodes are a great example of going deep, not necessarily on the content, but more on the medium because, you know, I I meet the people and they they see it and they sort of see behind the scenes.

Shay Nehmad:

It's always very engaging to do like a live episode and show people, oh, all the technical problems and how do we do it and whatever, even though it's really hard. So these like deep episodes are great for me. The other thing, and that's the thing I sort of wanna remove is laundry lists. You remember why we originally added, like, lightning round?

Jonathan Hall:

It was because we had a huge backlog that we couldn't get through. So we're like, let's take the things that are quick, that we could just mention it. They aren't maybe and maybe they aren't necessarily a 100% go relevant or or newsworthy, but it's good to let somebody know about them so they can go look it up if they want to. That was kind of the the concept, as I recall.

Shay Nehmad:

My feeling is that I would never do that. I never do this in real life. Like, I never come up to someone and I was like, hey, here's this link. I looked at it for forty seconds. Maybe you want to check it out.

Shay Nehmad:

Never send someone like a DM or, you know, on whatever whatever platform whom like email or or WhatsApp or Slack at work, something that I looked at for forty seconds. Generally, the keyword search fit fit that person. I was like, oh, is this interesting to you? Because I'm not a recommendation engine. And then when we have episodes where we have like, okay, three conferences and then five proposals and we just run through them and we don't get deep into any one of them and then we, you know, I I sort of lose interest.

Shay Nehmad:

I don't remember remember what happened, especially the lightning round. I never remember what we talk about at the lightning

Jonathan Hall:

So my my my feeling on on, like, as particularly the conferences and meetups and and the lightning round, my feeling on those is they're not meant to be deep. They're meant to be like, if this is interesting to you, now you know about it and you can go look it up. And if you're not interested, you should do like you and not remember it. Maybe that's not valuable in the show. I don't know.

Jonathan Hall:

But So

Shay Nehmad:

the conferences the conferences to me are valuable because they're timely. And also it's it's a lot of fun to like look at all the conferences or whatever. It's fine. I don't remember like the dates and whatever, but I don't know. That, you know, conferences in different countries and and people and speakers and then you look at the speakers, that's it's nice.

Shay Nehmad:

And also it feels good to promote other people. It feels nice to say like, oh, this speaker, his talk looks very interesting, this conference looks great and whatever, like supporting the community. But if we have news and we go through five items, this like, actual five different things that you could learn in a, I don't know, ten minute, like, you know, you cut the the stuff from the beginning and some filler that happens just because naturally, you talk for two minutes about a single thing, that's not enough, like that's not to me, that's not worth talking about at all. Like either because it's code, you gotta at least understand what's the problem, what's the solution, why it happened, and sometimes very rarely, you know, there's the smart quote thing, right? Oh, that's a funny bug.

Shay Nehmad:

Like nobody needs to go deep because there's nothing deep here. It's just a funny bug of the formatter worth mentioning because it's cool. Sure. It's like a nice fun fact. But when we have when the entire episode is comprised of these, like, oh, this is this proposal.

Shay Nehmad:

I didn't fully understand it, but we have to talk about the other one. And this is the security problem. I didn't actually look at the code. I don't know what the security problem is. I don't know how it would manifest, but you gotta upgrade.

Shay Nehmad:

I don't like Okay. Those I would love to remove just let's talk about fewer things.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

And but do them more deeply.

Jonathan Hall:

But do them deeper. Okay. Does that mean you wanna get rid of Lightning Round in particular?

Shay Nehmad:

Or I'm I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking we we talked about, like, deleting some columns in Trello anyway. Let's just delete that column. Let's just remove Let's

Jonathan Hall:

delete Trello. Let's find an alternative. That's another conversation. Yeah. I would love to hear from the audience.

Jonathan Hall:

If people find the Lightning Round valuable, let us know. Know, thumbs down the proposal before we make it final.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, we should do like a proposal process. Maybe we can open a GitHub project for Cup o' just for the discussions. Oh, we

Jonathan Hall:

could use GitHub issues instead of, Trello.

Shay Nehmad:

Slack. Oh, no. Here's a here's a small thing I would love to so I would love to remove the the just to do a few things. Another thing I would like to remove is alone episodes. If we can't get the co host or, you

Jonathan Hall:

only done something happens. A handful of those, haven't we?

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. I hated those. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

I did I remember doing one early on and it was terrible. Like, went through everything in, three minutes, like, now what? Sorry, guys.

Shay Nehmad:

So But I wanna This is a lone episode with an asterisk, right? If I come on, and this is audience, I'm sorry, but it did happen a few times where, you know, I was on call and production was down and we like had to record, and I like jumped on a call with you and I was like, you know, I had like the things open and I I summarized them enough so I can talk about it, but I didn't like give you my full attention. And you can hear that. You can hear that in the episode after. I don't know how often Do you listen to our show, like, a lot?

Jonathan Hall:

No, I don't.

Shay Nehmad:

I sometimes do. Like, if I have Yeah, you do. If it's a short episode and I just wanna experience how it, like maybe two, three weeks after, I'll, like, pop one on on the way to work, just for like, you know, quality control. And I can really feel in which episodes you are engaged, you're like on it, or which episodes you're like sick and your kid is sick, or you're moving and you have a lot on your mind. So it's not just about doing a fully alone episode, like one of us can't show up and we can't fight a co host, It's also about like being actually present.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Which again, it says we'll need to do fewer things. Like if you want to be actually present and very active and whatever, you can't do that for seven things over a really long episode. Like our episodes will have to remain short because we'll invest more energy into them. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

That's that's at least what I'm thinking. Let's do less of the automatic laundry list alone episodes and more focus. You had a thing about, celeb interviews.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Timothy Chalamet, his thoughts about Jalen Brunson, his thoughts

Jonathan Hall:

about Gary V on here. You know, I think it'd be fun to interview Rob Pike, Dave Cheney, maybe more of the Go team. I mean, celebrities, Russ talks celebrity baby is a little bit overselling it because, you know, this is a pretty small community as far as the world goes.

Shay Nehmad:

It's niche.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. It's fairly niche. I think it'd be it'll be fun to have some of those folks on. Maybe leaders in heavily in companies that do a lot of Go or, you know, leaders about Go projects, Docker and other

Shay Nehmad:

types of stuff. You know, people who work at Uber, at Google, at Facebook, at like whatever. Sometimes I think because of the nature of our show, we tend to And also our backgrounds, we tend to find like the oddball sort of people, like entrepreneurs, startup people, you know what I mean?

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

And we don't really talk to a lot of big tech, like developers.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I

Shay Nehmad:

feel that's an angle that's missing. But definitely, like, having big name interviews is all always nice. I don't know how we can you know what I mean? How we can make that happen. We think it's Probably should

Jonathan Hall:

start by reaching out to those folks.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. I guess so. By the way, I wonder if having video will, like, off put people from joining the podcast as interviewees.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Don't know.

Shay Nehmad:

You know what I mean? Although we always when we do the interview, we always turn on video just because it's easier to speak. Maybe recording video would off put people. So let's not necessarily video.

Jonathan Hall:

We certainly need to let our guests know ahead of time so they can prepare and, you know, come there.

Shay Nehmad:

Or we can let them choose.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah, we can do that.

Shay Nehmad:

But I'm down to trying to do more celeb interviews. I do think scheduling interviews and actually doing the interviews is very time consuming. Yes. So I'm like, let's do more of that, but there there has to be a limit on how much, we work to schedule these interviews. You know what I

Jonathan Hall:

mean? Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

Because just finding the people and scheduling it and then recording it and and, you know, lately this only happened lately, but some interviews have to go through multiple rounds of approval, especially if we get, like, you know, like someone from the Go team, probably Google's PR team will have to go over it

Jonathan Hall:

or whatever. Could be. Yeah. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

I will say for Google, I'm in like the SF Bay Area and your offices are here. I see them and every time I drive next to Shoreline, that like little circus building. So if anybody from the Go team is is willing to interview and also is working in the SF Bay Area, let's do that. Like, let's do a live video episode, that would be so awesome. One thing I, want to do, it's a small thing, I don't know, it's For me it's a taste thing, so let me know what do you feel about it.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

We always start the show with the same format. This show is supported by you, intro. And then this show, this is Cup o' Go for XXXdate. With Jonathan Hall and I'm with Shay Nehmad, then some joking around.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

I think this is useful because it tells you what this show is about and what's the current like, what date is it relevant for. Yeah. But a lot of podcasts I listen to, including by the way, this, like, My First Million thing, but also My Brother, My Brother and Me, and a lot of Israeli podcasts that I won't mention because it doesn't matter, but they start with a hook.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Like,

Shay Nehmad:

a sentence from the actual middle of the show, or, you know, just a hook that the host prepared ahead of time, just so, you know, every episode you set the the atmosphere. What do you think about that? Do you think the like consistent format in the beginning is actually nice because like you know what to expect and it's all like very predictable? Or would you like to throw a curveball, like sort of a hook at the beginning of every episode?

Jonathan Hall:

I think a hook is fine. I think that the This Is Cup o' Go for a blog date, keep up to date with important happenings. I think that's useful mostly for first time listeners so they understand what the show's about. Because one of the podcasts I listen to the most is is a philosophy podcast. And they just like, I I hate the intro to that podcast because the the host is just like, thanks for coming on the show.

Jonathan Hall:

Your recent book is about blah blah blah. Let's talk about your book. Like, I don't have any idea who the guest was. I don't know when the episode was recorded. I don't know what the topic they're talking about is.

Jonathan Hall:

And if I'm driving, I can't look at that stuff in my phone to see what's going on. So I really like having a brief verbal introduction. Now we at least we know the topic is news for the most part. But, like, knowing the format and and the date, I think is useful. And I think we keep it short enough that it shouldn't be a burden for longtime listeners.

Jonathan Hall:

If you're listening and you disagree, let them

Shay Nehmad:

the format is what

Jonathan Hall:

you're I think that would be fine. And this show is supported by you, Hart. I don't know. I think we added that on the When

Shay Nehmad:

we added our Patreon.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, yeah. We added it then. And I think partly, I might be mistaken about this, but I feel like we were trying to make the the break part shorter, and I don't think we succeeded on that. I think we still ramble too much in the break.

Shay Nehmad:

I'm sort of, by the way, like very serious podcasts, like, I don't know, Acquired and the CGP Grey ones and whatever, the ones where the podcast is an is the business as well. They have a lot of breaks, a lot of breaks and a lot of sponsors, a lot of ad content. You'll never hear a complaint about that from me. Like podcasting is very expensive, and if you've made it big enough that sponsors wanna work with you, like, you know, we had sponsors in the past, like Coyab and whatever, that's awesome. If a sponsor wants to buy your ad, your like listeners' attention and you vouch for that sponsor, you feel like it's a good company and it aligns with your listeners' interests, I'm sure a lot of listeners are down for that as well.

Shay Nehmad:

Our ad break is not useful for anybody. It's like not useful for us because we just ramble through it. It's not really useful for a long time. It's definitely not useful for long time listeners who've listened to the same spiel a thousand times. And I don't think it's super useful for long time listeners.

Shay Nehmad:

Like can't they type Cup o' Go into Google and find our website with all the links there? Why do they need

Jonathan Hall:

So me to tell here's my partial counterargument to that, and that is that I think it is valuable to let people know repeatedly about certain things. Like, have a swag store. We have a website. Do

Shay Nehmad:

we? Let's talk about that in a second.

Jonathan Hall:

We'll talk about that next. Yeah. Leave a rating and review. You know, every YouTube video says, be sure to hit like and subscribe. Right?

Jonathan Hall:

And and it's mildly annoying, but it's so fast. Who gives a crap, really?

Shay Nehmad:

It's Yeah. Keep it It does work.

Jonathan Hall:

For a

Shay Nehmad:

lot of videos, I would like watch it and I'll enjoy it. Then they'll be like, oh, hit the like and subscribe. And it's like, if it's, you know, creators I actually follow, I would do that. And I'm I'm I've never been like the Patreon or or YouTube subscribe person. But ever since we opened our Patreon, I've like, contributed to a few people on Twitch.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, cool. A few people on YouTube. I get it now.

Jonathan Hall:

So my my point is I do think the the the repetition is valuable, but I think we spend too much time on it. So I think we need to to make it quicker and shorter and faster. If we could do that in ten or fifteen seconds instead of four minutes, I think that would be a big improvement.

Shay Nehmad:

Okay, so here's a decision. The ad break is no more than thirty seconds and we don't spend any time on it in the beginning. Sure. It's just like a, we're not even gonna call it an ad break anymore,

Jonathan Hall:

which is like We shouldn't have called it that for a long time, but

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah, that was really Yeah. Let's brainstorm. How about, programming note? That's funny because we're a programming show.

Jonathan Hall:

Sure. Comment section. We call it the Go Doc.

Shay Nehmad:

GoDoc is good. So assuming we do these changes, right, we add video and we wanna push to more social platforms and we wanna push for bigger interviews, We want to try and go deeper, still cover like conferences and small things and whatever and give good Like, if there's a security release, let you know generally where it is. I felt like that was useful. But ideally, instead of reading 12 of them and not going deep into any one, you know, go deep on like two of them and then just mention the rest. Oh, by the way, there are more whatever.

Shay Nehmad:

We want to keep this low stress. We wanna keep this fun, and we wanna stay more connected. One thing and we wanna keep the ad break shorter unless we manage to get sponsors, and then we're like totally if we can vet them, we're totally down to, having them. Yeah. So we have a few tasks already, like go get sponsors and go get, the interviews and whatever, but mostly it's changes to the format, which I like.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

I have one This is like my big thing I'm bringing to the table, the thing that I want to change.

Jonathan Hall:

You wanna talk about Python,

Shay Nehmad:

don't Don't not even joking. I'm okay with you joking Russ, not Python. Bro, honestly, if I got back all the years, like all the time of my life that I helped people debug Python setups, I would be a year younger. It's like so much time wasted on like, no, you ran it in the wrong VN.

Jonathan Hall:

No, you gotta blah blah blah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

UV made it bailer, by the way. Charlie Marsh, you're awesome. Anyway, this is not a Python show. My, big idea was that I want this to, if the interview doesn't happen, right, which is pretty often, I want us to try replacing it with a new section, where you and I pair program, because we've been talking about programming together for three and a half years, Mhmm. And yet I've never received like a code review comment from you or we never sat in a design session together.

Shay Nehmad:

And sometimes, and especially after Genentech, I was really surprised. I taught, in one of my lectures in Genentech about using the Go debugger, which I find like debugging as like a skill, a skill I would interview for. I think it's hugely important. And then you came up after the show and were like, nah, debugging's for chumps. You should write tests and say, It's not what you said.

Jonathan Hall:

That's not fair. That's not fair, but okay.

Shay Nehmad:

I'm just saying that it's it's really, it really surprised me that, you and I have such different approaches to this specific thing. And I and I was start and I started realizing that I've never looked at your code. Like, don't know how you code. I've never looked at you open an IDE. I don't know how you use shortcuts, like, And I knew you I've I've looked at you doing it when you did some coding livestreams of Sure.

Shay Nehmad:

A while back. Yeah. But we didn't do it together.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

And that's my big offer. We start and finish a small Go coding project that is for the podcast. So it it is it does have a point. And we bias it to using stuff we talked about in the show. So like if we can use generics just to get the joke out of the way that I don't know how to use generics, we'll find a way to shove it in.

Shay Nehmad:

Or if there's a library that we talked about from like some interviewee and we're like, oh, you know what? Maybe we can use, I don't want to name a specific library, but three years ago we talked about Go Test Some. So maybe we can like see, run our tests both with the default Go Test command and Go Test Some and see what we prefer. Like reference things that we actually learned on the show, ideally even recently, and like live program for twenty minutes, like short coding sessions, almost like Kadas. You know, we'll do a project, we'll start with the first session will be requirements and design, and then we'll code through it until we finish it and then we deploy it and see what people feel.

Shay Nehmad:

And I think that this could be fun content or it could be horrible.

Jonathan Hall:

I think doing that in short session will be very difficult. I think if we could dedicate, you know, two to four hours on it, you know, to do something, we could get something interesting. And that that obviously couldn't be part of the regular show. That would have to be, like, on our other channel for Patreons only or well, you know, I don't mean that, but, you know, it would have to be, like, a side channel of some sort.

Shay Nehmad:

Why do you say that?

Jonathan Hall:

I don't think there's a whole lot of coding we can do that would be I mean, other than maybe a CADA that we could do in twenty minutes. CADA, it's not gonna be very likely related to something that we talked about or that's relevant to the show.

Shay Nehmad:

Okay. So you're saying it's ill it just takes a little while to, like, warm up, you know, get our engines started and actually program something.

Jonathan Hall:

I I think so. Yeah. I mean, when I do when I do live streaming of my coding, I usually set aside three to four hours and it goes by so fast and I feel like I never got anything done because it was just so quick.

Shay Nehmad:

So I've never done, live coding live streams before. Yeah. I wouldn't want to do like another show. That's, I don't have room for another podcast or live streaming thing or whatever. And if we do something new, like a four hour long form pair programming session, it won't have benefited from everything we've learned over the last three and a half we want to shelf this idea, or do we want to try We can keep it on the editing room floor if it doesn't work, but I think thirty minutes time capped once every two weeks.

Shay Nehmad:

We just jump into it, someone leads, the other one like follows and comments. We keep it a very, very small project, like, and my thinking is a thing that reads the RSS feeds, uses a local model to, like, generate a few snippets and post it to social media, just like a tiny task that we would take off our desk following this, like, session. Maybe we could do it. Maybe, maybe.

Jonathan Hall:

I I mean, so even that project, I think, to do it do it well would take more than thirty minutes, but maybe it means to spread it over several weeks.

Shay Nehmad:

But even so, like Like, over time. Yeah. But I I don't know. I wouldn't not to that's this is gonna sound weird. I don't know if I would listen to that, but I I didn't listen to a lot of shows like our show anyway, so I don't know if that's a good

Jonathan Hall:

I think that's something to watch more than to listen to. I don't think listening to the J. B. L. Pair program is gonna be interesting even if we're talking about it very actively, which is a skill that's hard to do, and I I'm struggling with it in my livestreaming.

Jonathan Hall:

You know, just watching someone code is boring. You have to hear their their stream of thought. And remembering to verbalize that, at least solo, is difficult. Maybe one or together would be easier because I'm asking you, what are you thinking and and stuff like that. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

What are you doing?

Shay Nehmad:

Why are you clicking this? What what what tool are

Jonathan Hall:

you using? Why are you using the debugger? Come on, man.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. It's also way more vulnerable than doing the show. To be fair, when we do the show, you know, we sound super smart. We read, other people's, like, smart content, like their proposals, we get into these corners. And I have to admit, a lot of the times I feel, I know a lot of people have these feelings, but like a little bit of imposter syndrome where I talk about these really complicated Go concepts.

Shay Nehmad:

And as, by the way, as I'm not doing Go in production right now, I feel I don't wanna say like a fraud because I'm not defrauding anybody of anything, but sometimes I feel like I don't fully, fully, fully understand what I'm talking about. I understand it enough to explain it to someone else, but if they ask me something about it, I wouldn't be able to. And that happens to us on the show from time to time. Well, I'll be like, wait, but Jonathan, about this thing you're talking about, blah, blah, blah, what happens? And you're like, oh, I actually don't fully understand it.

Shay Nehmad:

Then we have to edit it and redo that section again. I think if we pair program, that's not gonna happen because we're actually programming a thing, right? It'll be simple enough that we have to understand it because otherwise we can't program it. You know what I mean? Then we verbalise And on don't, it's not gonna be as high level as the show.

Shay Nehmad:

It's not gonna be as information dense as the show. It's gonna be a lot more fun and like riff raffy. It's It's going be a rougher.

Jonathan Hall:

So here are my thoughts. I think doing a pair programming project would be great. I think squeezing it into thirty minute segments would be really difficult. I think a better fit for the thirty minute approach, if we want to do that, would be for one of us to research one of the projects or libraries we've talked about and give the other person a demo. Look, here's this thing I built to sequence DNA and Go or whatever the toy example is that week.

Jonathan Hall:

Don't know how the problem is that that's more upfront work. We can't just wing it, and it's still not an audio sort of thing for the most part. It's mostly visual.

Shay Nehmad:

A, it's not A, it's a lot of upfront work, B, it's not visual, and C, I don't think it fills thirty minutes. I released a feature I worked on for the last month, including nights and whatever in my startup. I think we haven't posted on LinkedIn yet, but I'm gonna say it's like agent, AI agent defense from a risk combo perspective, something cybersecurity, cool, cool, cool, cool, lead, lead, lead, cyber, cyber. And we did like a demo for the entire team today and we can fill like forty five minutes. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

A finished product demo, if the product is good, takes five, takes two minutes, right? Oh, here's the thing, click on this thing, this is what it does. So I don't know about like the upfront

Jonathan Hall:

work You can plus make a coding demo last longer, but that's like where you're showing here's how, here's how to build the thing. But that that's So it's not a

Shay Nehmad:

it's not a demo.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. But that's like a conference talk type of thing, and that that requires a lot of upfront work.

Shay Nehmad:

So Yeah. I'm not going to do that every week.

Jonathan Hall:

I don't think that's what we want to want to do. I would suggest that we try a pair programming, but we do it on a weekend when we both can dedicate two to four hours, and we we give it a shot. And we put it on the YouTube channel, and we say and then it's not part of the same episode, and it's a one time thing at least for at first. And we say, by the way, we did this programming, go check it out on YouTube. And then from that, can decide if it if it's something we want to repeat, and if so, in what format.

Shay Nehmad:

Okay. So here's my counter offer. Okay. I'm willing to do that. This gonna actually sound super fun, but we structure it in thirty, thirty minute sections.

Shay Nehmad:

So instead of just four hours of long form content, We structure it so we can, like, put it at the end of the episode

Jonathan Hall:

We can try.

Shay Nehmad:

Every week. You know what

Jonathan Hall:

I mean? I'm skeptical that it's gonna work very well, but but

Shay Nehmad:

In the same session, so it's still

Jonathan Hall:

like I won't know till we try.

Shay Nehmad:

I I think we can do it. What I what I'm imagining is the feeling you get when you sit at a coffee shop next to two people who are working and they're like excited to show you show you what they're they're working on, but you're there just to like eat a croissant, drink your coffee, and then hang out with them for like ten more minutes and they're like, all right guys, I gotta go, I gotta catch my train. Not a, I'm sitting in a room together with other developers who forgot to take this meeting to the meeting room.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

And I have to admit, I've tried a lot of times to watch people program on Twitch and stuff like that. The only thing that holds my attention in like long form solo development live streams is game development because it has a very visual effect and a very quick feedback loop. I've never tried to watch two people pair program, certainly not long form, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Jonathan Hall:

Let's figure out how to try it. I think our first version, our first episode of that is to decide what our project is. Would you agree with that?

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah, I give it.

Jonathan Hall:

I know you have some ideas and I have some ideas too. And I think they're not they're they're not the same, but they're not far from each other. So I think our first our first episode in that series, actually. Will be discussing what to build.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. I wanted to now that we talked about like when we want to add, when we want to remove, how the show's gonna change, mention before we, summarize here, a few, pointers we got from our listeners.

Jonathan Hall:

So

Shay Nehmad:

you want to take what they Do you want to tell us what they said?

Jonathan Hall:

Sure. So first, Nicolas said he likes the proposal section. It's nice to anticipate the things that are under discussion or coming soon. And I have gotten the same feedback from a few people in person too, that they really like learning about what's coming in the language. So and and that's one of my favorite parts to produce because I get to go read about that stuff.

Shay Nehmad:

And and that's about other than if I find a really, really good blog post, that's the most, interesting part too. Yeah. So I definitely like it. I do, like we said, there's a few ways we can improve it, but I really like it and it's not going anywhere, Nicholas. I think that's like the core of most episodes, to be honest.

Shay Nehmad:

And we're really glad you like it and thank you for that feedback. No. There is one note here, from Andy, long term friend of the show that I've also met in person, Andy Williams. He co hosted while I couldn't make it and stuff like that. He was interviewed and we mentioned him a lot also.

Shay Nehmad:

Hey, Andy, what's up? Mentioned that it would be cool to bring exciting uses of Go to light, inspire folks as well as educate them. To me this, I don't understand what Andy wants really. I think it's like most Go work is like backend server work. Let's focus on the other parts.

Shay Nehmad:

I think that's what he's trying to say.

Jonathan Hall:

That might be. And we've tried to do that and we have to some extent. We've had two folks on to talk about their use of Go at gaming companies, which is it's not game development, but at least it's gaming adjacent, right? They're using their, you know, game back end stuff. And of course, Andy himself has talked about GUI programming on the show a few times in Go.

Jonathan Hall:

So

Shay Nehmad:

I I would say very selfishly, my current situation is I wanna keep the show relevant to what I do and I'm mostly right now, I'm like architect in a small startup. Most of what I do is back end, server, data, cyber related work. And if I can talk about that, like a vulnerability that was found in a parser, or, you know, something related to performance analysis or concurrency or work with databases or work with data pipelines, I would find that more educational and irrelevant, and therefore there's more chance I'll stay engaged. Like, there's a limit to how much I can talk about GUI programming in Go as like a tidbit where I've never developed a GUI app. You are

Jonathan Hall:

excited about DNA programming in Go, and I think that's an example of it. At least for me, that's an example of something a little bit unusual and therefore exciting. Or when you talk to the guy about hugging face, some of that sort of stuff. But that's what I think he's talking about. I could be wrong, but that's what I interpret.

Shay Nehmad:

So I'll tell you what, I think we need to separate like the horizontal from the vertical. It's really cool to talk about applying Go and that it doesn't matter if it's client side server side, Wasm or backend or whatever, towards a project that's very interesting, like the DNA thing. Like the outcome is something I'm not usually working on. I wouldn't be very interested in listening to another b to b cyber, company, telling me about their product, just because it uses Go. You know what I mean?

Shay Nehmad:

Right. But I would be interested in someone using the same libraries and the same architecture, telling about the libraries and the architecture, exactly the same thing for farming automation farming AI automation. You know what I mean? That I would find interesting because I don't know anything about that, about the outcome. But in terms of, the the means, I would be more interested to listen about things that are close to me than, like, you know, like slicing it horizontally to, like, oh, really, really deep compiler work, you know what I mean, that I I don't do.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. But we get we that feedback and we'll try to keep it balanced. I know that the show can be a little bit, you know, heavy on specific topics. We try to keep it varied as much as we can, but maybe we can put more focus on that.

Jonathan Hall:

Yep. One last comment was from Miki tebeka, who says he would he really likes the news part of the podcast as he doesn't get to use Go in his daily work, and it feels like Cup o' Go is what it would feel like to sit around Go people all day. So sorry you don't get to use Go every day, but at least you get a little bit of that taste.

Shay Nehmad:

Same. I would recommend to open a Go podcast with Jonathan. Like, Go three and a half years in the past and open the podcast with him, but given you're not gonna get that chance, we're here for you, man. The news part of the show is not gonna change, that's like obviously The the most important format of it is not gonna change a lot as well, so Miki, you have nothing to worry about and we really appreciate the feedback as well. There's one other thing I

Jonathan Hall:

think we need to talk about because we mentioned it we didn't and dive in that is the Swag Store.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh yeah, that's way expensive. I set it up in the like most expensive way possible, and people don't really get the swag anymore. It's very rare, like once in a blue moon someone gets like the cup or whatever. Sometimes there are shipping problems. We have one, like the We have one company that provides the items and the shipping and they're doing really good work, like no problems there.

Shay Nehmad:

And if there's items missed or lost or whatever, there's support, they're okay. It's called Printify by the way. I don't know if people this is such a meta episode, maybe people are interested. But I set up the store when I was in Israel. So I had to do it with like Israeli credit card, whatever.

Shay Nehmad:

It's way harder to do. So I had to set up both Wix and PayMe so people could pay using a credit card. I think in America it's a lot easier, but, it was really difficult. And also Wix hiked their prices crazy high. So yes, it does auto publish from Printify to Wix and it's very comfortable.

Shay Nehmad:

And if it's a business, if your thing is selling online, I don't know, like soap or whatever, I highly recommend the setup because it's it's very easy to set up and it works and you have audit logs and whatever tax, whatever. We sell a cup once every, two months and we get our own swag so we can give it to people at conferences and whatever. Yeah. So I think we we change it to a very simple format where people email us. We keep the catalog on the site manually with some pictures.

Shay Nehmad:

We remove all the items that don't sell, and we just have like the swag store becomes a page where you click email me and you're like, here's my address, but then how will people pay us? I don't know.

Jonathan Hall:

We'll talk about it, but yeah, I think we either need to find a pay as you go solution that has no monthly fee or kill it. And, you know, if just if we kill it, we could still do, like, once a year or twice a year, have a, hey. We've got an order of 20 mugs. Who wants one? You know, us know.

Jonathan Hall:

Or you know, we could do that sort of thing. Or we're we're gonna print new T shirts January, let us know who wants one, that sort of stuff. We could do something like that for people who want it on a a case by case basis.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, so what you're saying is let's let's keep the items as an option, it's not like available. You don't put your credit card and it shows up at your doorstep like a FedEx guy two days later. It's like, we're gonna collect all these and then once a year, you know, it's not gonna be too many of them or whenever it feels all right, I'm just gonna order them to my house and then ship them

Jonathan Hall:

I from US think that could be an option. I don't know if it's the best option, but it's it's an option that, would probably cost a lot less money, a little bit more labor intensive. But if it's only once or twice a year, it's not a big deal, at least to me. Okay. International shipping could could be a little bit more involved, but

Shay Nehmad:

No. So if if people are intern like, all that shipping stuff, can solve directly by Printify. Like, I can put the orders manually in in there because there's such low volume. I will say I do like having physical things of the show in the real world. Talking about the thing about the brand I said before, I think having stickers, having mugs, having shirts, having hoodies is really nice.

Shay Nehmad:

It's also cool for me to like walk around with my Go hoodie. Oh, this is audio this is a video format. Wanna unbox your new shirt? Bring the thing This to the is my handwriting.

Jonathan Hall:

Went to Let's The US see what's inside.

Shay Nehmad:

Remember the anthrax up at the Ta

Jonathan Hall:

da.

Shay Nehmad:

You're only showing the, like, not relevant part.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Cup o' Go embroidered. That's a nice shirt too.

Shay Nehmad:

Really, really cool to

Jonathan Hall:

wear in the summertime.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah, it's like a summer It's a

Jonathan Hall:

brand, it's a Columbia, so it's not just a knockoff cheap whatever, it's a quality shirt.

Shay Nehmad:

It passed one laundry in my house and made it, so

Jonathan Hall:

I'm sorry.

Shay Nehmad:

So I'm thinking like API deprecation, we keep it around for one more month, also just because I already paid the my Wix bill for July. So we'll like, guys, this is the last month, y'all, August, we're shutting down the store. So this is your last chance to get items. And then it's gonna be like once, you know, you can email us about it and we'll write it down, but it'll show up maybe a year later or something like that.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I mean, if we're getting ready to do a shipment or or an order, we'll we'll let you know, like, hey, we're gonna we're gonna put in an order or whatever. We can figure it out. But We can do it quarterly.

Shay Nehmad:

Like, once every quarter, there's a shipment or something.

Jonathan Hall:

Honestly, at this point, if we just killed it entirely, it would be an improvement, just because it's costing us so much money.

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. So I'll definitely kill it, but let's give people a month also because I paid for the month already. Yeah. I have other stuff running on Wix, like for my dad's business, but maybe I can kill that as well. I don't think a lot of people

Jonathan Hall:

Can we set a board press or something else that plugs into this Printify that wouldn't cost anything?

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Ideally we kill it and we have, the swag store has some pictures of the thing and you can email us at store@cupo'go.dev if you want to buy one of them and we'll figure it

Jonathan Hall:

out. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

And just have that go to me and I'll And

Jonathan Hall:

just mail us a check like it's $19.93.

Shay Nehmad:

Woah. Import Go money. No. I'm sure, like, we can find a way, you know, where people like We'll figure

Jonathan Hall:

it out. We're tech guys. Maybe that's what our project is. We build our own, our own spike store.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, yeah. Finance. That's really easy. I'm I'm down. I'm down.

Shay Nehmad:

Kill it. Well, you have to you have to make room for if you wanna, make room for new, you gotta kill the old. Let's kill the store in one month.

Jonathan Hall:

Alright. Perfect. Settled. How do you feel? Let's summarize.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Let's do it.

Shay Nehmad:

We're making it better.

Jonathan Hall:

We're gonna make it better.

Shay Nehmad:

Make Cup o' great again. Let's make let's make a red hat with white lettering.

Jonathan Hall:

With Brewster. Alright. So we're gonna start doing video. Are are we committed to that?

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. Okay. We're gonna do video. Have We'll try. Shave every Friday.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, wait. If I do video, then I'm gonna need, to clear the people out or do it from my home. Oh. I mean, I'm at the office, so I'll have to ask people, or we can record it slightly earlier. Okay, we'll figure it

Jonathan Hall:

out. We'll figure it We'll details out.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Yep.

Jonathan Hall:

So we'll start doing video. We're gonna start looking into more social media in some form. We haven't nailed down those details yet.

Shay Nehmad:

We're gonna try to do short form videos if we can. We're gonna try to get at least one from this episode, how meta is that. We're gonna try to move from we're informing you a list of a lot of things to this is news for this week that we think is highly impactful and will make us better coders or programmers or developers or whatever professionals, and therefore you. We're gonna do a fun hook at the beginning.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

We're gonna try that. We're gonna try and get more sponsors, get a sponsor, and get more interviews. And we're gonna keep having fun talking and teaching each other Go. Think that's the main thing. We're gonna keep the core of the show the same, which is you and I teaching each other Go, having fun, telling stupid dad jokes, and keeping this as like a fun and expensive hobby that is not our main thing.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Cool. Cool. And we're switching to Erlang K, but No. Alright.

Shay Nehmad:

Oh, I do like our outro, so we can keep that.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay. Yeah. The music is fun. The intro and the outro, all all the little musical bits are good, I think.

Shay Nehmad:

I record them. Oh, you I record them, and my wife saves them.

Jonathan Hall:

Do you do you mean the the program exited outro? Is that what you're talking about?

Shay Nehmad:

Or the music? But also the sound bites. The sound bites

Jonathan Hall:

are good.

Shay Nehmad:

We can keep them. Yeah. Also, recorded them and my wife sings in them, so that's perfect. Yeah. Of course.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Okay. So I think that's program exited. Program exited. Goodbye.

Shay Nehmad:

Program exited. Goodbye.