Cup o' Go

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Creators & 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 Bolgè
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

Shay Nehmad:

This show is supported by you. Stick around till the ad break to hear more about that. This is Keppa Go for January 3rd 2025. Fixing the 2024 that's written in our notes right now. And everybody who listens and has a website or a company, go change the footer as well.

Shay Nehmad:

Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about 15 minutes per week. I'm Shayne Ahmad.

Jonathan Hall:

And I'm Jonathan Hall.

Shay Nehmad:

Happy New Year.

Jonathan Hall:

Hey. Happy New Year.

Shay Nehmad:

Empty notebook. 365 pages in it. What are you gonna write? I heard this promotion on the radio. I think it was New York Times or The Daily or something.

Jonathan Hall:

Uh-huh.

Shay Nehmad:

An ad. I really liked it. It's a cool ad. So we have a huge ass backlog of things to talk about from the holiday season. We took a break.

Shay Nehmad:

We tried to pick the top things that we thought would be interesting for this week. We're gonna talk about a meetup. We're gonna talk about some lectures. We're gonna talk about some blog posts, and we're gonna go into the dev survey results. I'm sure all of you voted and now you can see, if you voted correctly and if you have your finger on the zeitgeist.

Shay Nehmad:

And since this is a new year, we're gonna have to come up with a new stumper question for our interviewees. So we legitimately don't know what it's gonna be yet, and you're gonna discover that it alongside us. That was clunky. Let's go to news because we know how to do that.

Jonathan Hall:

So, first up, as you mentioned, there's a meetup. I wanna talk about, the Irish Go First are getting together again. This is the relaunch of Go Ireland, in, in Dublin, February 6th. So you have time if you're in the area. We're talking about benchmarking Go at this one.

Jonathan Hall:

This year, relaunch, I don't know how long it's been since the last one. I don't know if it's been since pre COVID. It was been that long or not, but if you're an Irish gopher and I know several. I used to work with a bunch of Irish gophers because I I worked for an Irish company. So maybe some of my buddies will be there.

Shay Nehmad:

Alright. I love Dublin. I'd go Nice city. Back. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. And, of course, you could you should check it's a new year, whatever, coming back from holidays, wherever you are, like, in whatever city you are or country you are, look for your Go community and go to a meetup. It's gonna be cool. It's almost always worth it, especially since the food is free. So, like, what can you lose?

Shay Nehmad:

Worst case you're eating some shitty pizza. But, yeah, it's good stuff. I wanna talk about a blog post I found.

Jonathan Hall:

Let's do it.

Shay Nehmad:

That I found really interesting because this year, it's not a New Year's resolution. I don't really believe in those, but do you know, I'm blanking. That guy on YouTube does explainer videos stick figure. Super popular. CGP Grey.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay.

Shay Nehmad:

That guy. He has a podcast, that I really like called, Hello Internet or something like that where he talks about not doing a yearly resolutions, doing themes. What the theme of the year. My theme of the year is being less dogmatic about languages. This blog post just is all about that because I'm not gonna be programming in Go a lot this year even though I really like it, and I think this is fine.

Shay Nehmad:

Right? I wanna be at peace with that. And this blog post from Alexander Fadayev, I found it really towards that sentiment of let's take good things from languages and try to make them work together instead of being, like, very tribal about this is the best language and I'm gonna die on this hill, whatever. It's Rust goes async. Usually, when I try to get back into Rust, like, once a year when I'm trying to feel smart, I start doing it and then I stop.

Shay Nehmad:

And I stop at Async because it's very difficult and I know, and I'm, like, doing air quotes here, that Async Rust is notoriously difficult and looks really ugly. I don't know how much experience you've had trying to write Rust at all or, like, async Rust.

Jonathan Hall:

I've never done Rust, but I did some async in other languages that was definitely a pain in the butt.

Shay Nehmad:

Versus go where right? That's the whole that's the whole point. You wanna start a, you know, you're not spawn spawn a task, literally write the word go. You wanna do some communication, open a channel and literally put the arrow sign on it. I don't know if you have a glyphs in your, like, terminal or editor that make the arrow look nice, or are you using, like,

Jonathan Hall:

a normal one? I've definitely seen that. I don't think I have that maple, in my current configuration.

Shay Nehmad:

I've just set up a ghosty, that new editor, that new terminal emulator everybody's raving about and it has that built in. I really like that. Anyway, so, you know, the whole concurrency thing looks really good in Go. This blog post just suggests a mind map that shows if you know how to do a thing in Go, for example, setting up a channel, here's how you did that in Rust, just the equivalent syntax, which I found super super useful and it really makes reading Async Rust a lot easier for me. Just shows an example from the Go documentation and then the Rust equivalent and it literally physically drawing arrows from the Go code to the Rust code to sort of help you do that mental mapping which I really really liked.

Shay Nehmad:

For example, in go, you would say go and then call a function say and pass the parameter world. In Rust, you would spot like, do Tokyo, colon colon spawn, then pass in a function call, like, say, hello world. With Tokyo and with the async std, what are the cargo things called? I think packages. Crates, sorry, crates.

Jonathan Hall:

Yes.

Shay Nehmad:

And the the mapping between select in Go and Tokyo select in Rust, even with a tiny, you know, gopher in ASCII, the thing that we talked about in the past is a potential file extension

Jonathan Hall:

Yes.

Shay Nehmad:

Versus Rust, which gets a, like, a top level emoji with a crab. You know what I mean? Because it's a crustacean. So just equivalents, really really simple short blog post. If you're doing, Rust and you're having trouble with async and you know go pretty well, this is just gonna be the, like, missing link part of the puzzle for you.

Shay Nehmad:

And as always, whenever there's a really good blog post, I sort of went and dug through Alexander's blog, and it's pretty good, like, about development and cybersecurity. Go read more of his, blog post. And, Alexander, if you're hearing this, make more of them, please.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. That's pretty cool. I like that post. Yeah. I haven't I haven't done rest yet, but

Shay Nehmad:

Maybe in 2025. Who knows?

Jonathan Hall:

May maybe it could happen.

Shay Nehmad:

Talking about things that will happen in 2025, I have good money that we're gonna have 2 surveys about 2025.

Jonathan Hall:

That seems like a good guess. Probably 2 go releases as well. 2 major ones.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. And one huge cyber security bug that's gonna cause blue screens all over the world for me. That was crazy. That was 2024. Feels like ages ago, that that CrowdStrike thing.

Shay Nehmad:

Well, if only they've written in a better language. Speaking of better languages, talk about the GoDev survey. We actually had the the author of the survey or the people behind the survey on the show.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. We had Alice Merrick on, several months ago. So I'll put a link to the show notes in this we'll put a link in the show notes to that interview if you wanna, refresh your memory or if you missed that one talking about what goes into the survey and what they're trying to learn and how they do that and and other good things.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. That was that was a really good talk.

Jonathan Hall:

I'm interested in the experience of using tools, you know, for humans and, other kinds of technologies. Sure. Wonderful. I think this is my last question before we talk about the survey.

Shay Nehmad:

So some of the things are to be expected. Right? People who answered the survey like Go.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Yeah. That's not a surprise. 90 some odd percent, are satisfied with Go. 4% are dissatisfied.

Shay Nehmad:

I would love to meet these people.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Who's who was so dissatisfied that they're answering the survey in the first place? Of course, everybody uses Linux, 61%. 59% use macOS. You might notice that as it's more than a 100 already.

Jonathan Hall:

I guess people like to use more

Shay Nehmad:

than 1 operating system. And the 24% on Windows, that's more than I would have expected. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

And then and then WSL is its own category. That's 15%. So that's interesting. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Because it's not really Linux. I think people who do WSL might answer Windows by accident, but they actually like, the whole toolchain is is Linux ish.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm. Mhmm.

Shay Nehmad:

But the deployment environment has been and stayed Linux. People deploy Go usually to the cloud and containerized workloads, so it's all running on on Linux. And I assume even people who said Windows and Mac OS might be mistaken. Like, I assume there's some error rate here with more of the beginners thinking they're deploying to Windows, because I don't know, they're deploying to Azure Cloud in their company or or whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Right. Right. Right.

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. Interesting. And, architectures was a question for for, like, different deployment categories, which I found surprising. Like, who but but I guess it's important. Right?

Shay Nehmad:

You need to know which architectures to optimize for or whatever. But I think this is as as a survey question, it's pretty funny because you should have telemetry at this point giving you real answers. True. Maybe comparing the reported data to the actual data can tell you who's not answering the survey. Right?

Shay Nehmad:

Just people who are compiling for, I, 386 architectures, they they hate answering surveys. So what have you found which was sort of new?

Jonathan Hall:

So what I think is interesting though is that they follow this up with another question. This one I believe has been asked, over the previous years, which is what is your preferred editor for Go? And I'm I'm not really sure what to make of the difference here. So they do mean, as you suggested, Shai, that that they, there is a potential bias. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

Right. Almost certainly a bias because, they ask people who use Versus Code or Golang. They're they're, like, prompted to fill out the survey. So I don't think they did it with, Emacs and and Vim. But the second question is, what is your preferred editor?

Jonathan Hall:

Versus Code ranks the highest, 38%, DOLAN second, 35, and VIM third at 17%. So the ranking is the same as those who use it regularly, but it looks as though 66% of people use Versus Code regularly, but only 38% prefer to use Versus Code. So I'm sure that this selection bias is playing in here somehow. I'm not quite sure what that means, though. It's it's an interesting disparity.

Shay Nehmad:

I think, like, preferred is is such a, is such a loaded term because I think my preferred editor is, like, a fully decked out Vim with, GoPLS and the tags and everything working and all the shortcuts just because it works really fast and it looks really good and whatever. But I experienced some sort of moving between machines a lot and companies a lot and whatever and Versus code with Vim bindings just works. And it works, you know, in the web editor if you're suddenly need to work on someone else's machine, you just go into GitHub and you, like, press dot and opens the web editor with your extensions and everything you like. So I've definitely used Versus Code for Go development a ton. The killer feature for me, at least this year, was AI completion.

Shay Nehmad:

Right? Copilot, which Vim doesn't have. So I've basically relegated Vim just for, like, quick file editing or editing where I don't need to do where I need to do a lot of searching, search and replacing, macros, things like that, or git commits and and, like, that's it. I I don't use it for anything else, both for Go and Python, by the way, which were my main languages, like, this year. But if if you I I think I enjoy, like, working in Vim more.

Shay Nehmad:

It feels more crafty than Versus Code. But as a daily driver, Versus Code, no problem. One thing is I don't get is why people like Golang. I just hate these intelligent editors. What's your preferred, editor for this?

Jonathan Hall:

Versus Code is the one I use the most or something that I don't like about it. I was a big Atom fan before it was abandoned. So I've never heard of it. Helix.

Shay Nehmad:

I never even heard of it. I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a try right now. I tried Ghosty, the new editor, and I was pretty pleased with it. Postmodern text editor. That's a bit pretentious.

Jonathan Hall:

The first the first FAQ. Postmodern? It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is the postmodern.

Shay Nehmad:

Good. Good. Good stuff. Built in Rust for the terminal. No Electron.

Shay Nehmad:

I like how the fact that we're not bringing Chromium alongside with your app is now a feature for for software. I mean, it is true. But yeah. I think the the main thing is to not be tribal about this stuff and be excited about trying new, editors and picking out features. I've, like, tried Emacs for a while when I tried to learn Closure.

Shay Nehmad:

Dude, that was really cool. Like, I wasn't productive in it, and I I had a really hard time, but seeing people, like, being obsessive about their configurations for years years and getting really productive in a specific editor was really cool. I don't like it. I still don't like IntelliJ, though. Unless they wanna sponsor this, show.

Shay Nehmad:

In which case, I'm gonna be the biggest chill on the planet for, a slow editor that spends a half of the time doing, like, the index indexing thing and messes up Go Go modules all the time.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Let's talk about one other aspect of this, survey before I move on to other topics. One of the new questions was about, Go for Teams. And, the question that I I wanna call out here is, at work, to what extent do the following challenges impact your current teams' experiences in Go? And the highest ranked one was maintaining consistent coding standards across our Go code base with 23% saying it was significant challenge for their team and an additional 35 saying it was a minor challenge.

Jonathan Hall:

That's more than half thought that was a challenge. I find that surprising because Go code standards, I don't I mean, like, GoFund and and even just the sort of opinionated nature of of the Go ecosystem seems like there should be a much smaller problem for Go than many other languages. But it still seems to be a struggle for well over half.

Shay Nehmad:

I think the the code standards is not about the the formatting. Right? People don't care about the white space, and I think it's more about people who come into Go from other languages. I've seen that a lot at work where I've successfully converted quite a lot of Python engineers into Go, developers, Go engineers. You know, you bring your sort of a sort of conceptions about how a good code looks.

Shay Nehmad:

Right? Like, clean code and how code should be arranged and what abstractions you should think about. And you, like, would start with planning out how the objects and classes would look like first, which is not very Go ish. Anybody who's coming from a dynamically typed languages, for example, takes a while to, like, figure out exactly when to use a type alias. And, you know, just this week, I had to, talk to someone about yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Goat doesn't really have enums and it sucks. And you need to think about cogeneration if you really wanna make it work. People come from Java or Ruby or Python are gonna have a a difficult time, like, writing go ish go. I hate the word, like, idiomatic, but if you have one go ish gopher in your team and 1 Python ish gopher in your team, it's gonna be, like, difficult to maintain a code base and sort of justify the the Go state of state of mind because it it takes a while to get used to it. Know what I mean?

Shay Nehmad:

The the fact that the for example, inheritance is not such a big thing. You know, people learned in university inheritance and then worked in Java for 4 years. There they have the the object oriented brain rot. It's hard to get over it. No shade if you're writing in Java right now, of course.

Shay Nehmad:

One question I found interesting, even though it was super obvious that it's going to be asked this year, is about AI. What do you do with AI and go? Of course, AI, AI, AI. Everybody needs to justify their valuations and their GPUs that they bought this year, but I like the way they approached it, like, what AI, usages people have done. First of all, the the thing that is blowing my mind that people are not using LLM assistance for writing Go in the last month is 30% of the people who answer.

Shay Nehmad:

Are you in that cohort of, like, not using Copilot?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Quite heavily.

Shay Nehmad:

So I'm I'm I I really am struggling to understand people who have not used an LLM for writing Go for a month if they code professionally or even for like, only if you're a student and you just wanna sort of grind through the syntax to really learn it at this specific month. That shouldn't be 30% of the people answering this survey. Right? So I I

Jonathan Hall:

I would love to see, like, the the experience like, like, the the the cross section. What's their experience level and and their age compared to this question? Are these the really experienced engineers who are like, I don't need LLMs. I already know what I'm doing. Or is it the the people who haven't just learned it yet?

Jonathan Hall:

I'm really curious.

Shay Nehmad:

So the actually, people who don't use an LLM are the more experienced according to the survey. Like, people who are less experienced tend to not answer this. 25% of people who are up to 2 years of experience don't use an LLM. 33% of people who are 5 years 5 plus years of experience don't use an LLM. It also the breakdown of where they work is interesting.

Shay Nehmad:

Solo developers and large organizations. If you're in a medium or small organization, you, don't answer that. Again, relatively. And I was just super surprised because I've been using it for the rest of the examples here, like, the top one is code completion, writing tests, which I don't do that much with AI to be honest because I like writing my test TDD and, like, thinking about them. But definitely the boiler plate and, like, coming up with more cases for sure.

Shay Nehmad:

Generating go from, natural language description, I've definitely given, like, Claude a broad, hey, start writing this script for me. It goes to backstage API and GitHub API blah blah blah. It just roughs out, you know, fine I don't know, like, please put the references in the in the comments above each API call so I can actually fix your mistakes for you just to rough out the the start. And as you go down the list, it it's more esoteric cases like resolving compiler errors or debugging failures or suggesting libraries or converting code from another programming languages. I found this interesting.

Shay Nehmad:

I assume the numbers are are really gonna change pretty fast. Like, people who don't use LLMs at all are gonna become sort of fringe just because as the models become better and it people become better at using it, I just I can't see it going any other way. Although, I might be wrong.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, I I think pretty soon the people who answer no will be will be the people who don't realize they're using it even though they are.

Shay Nehmad:

What do you mean? Like, how could you I

Jonathan Hall:

I I think l LLMs are gonna be built into so many things. Like, if you're using Versus code, you'll probably be using or or or go land, or eventually, you'll be using LLMs without even realizing it. It's autocomplete and just a lot of the built in features

Shay Nehmad:

Code review and whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I think I think we won't realize we're using LLMs.

Shay Nehmad:

That might be the case, or your boss might be replaced with a LOM that generates the Jira tickets for you. And I don't wanna be, you know, like scary old AI. I think it's called AI doomers at this point, but I've seen, have you had a chance to play around with, Devon? Hashtag not sponsored. It's sort of like, you don't you give it the test cases and the setup and you and you make sure it it has a dev container it can run on and then it does the tasks for you.

Shay Nehmad:

Takes, like, 2 hours and it, in my experience, about 20% of the time can finish a a junior one story point task in about a day. Like, I'm not this is a this is a huge advancement. Right? I'm not knocking it's not good. It's not good.

Shay Nehmad:

But it might be better than the developer who says I have 0 years of experience, and I don't use NLMs, at least at this point in time. Yeah. If you work hard and, I don't know, you do boot.dev and you and you grind out Lee Code and you read books and you get better and you listen to the podcast blah blah blah. Like, you will be better pretty quickly than the AI tooling is. But not knowing how to use it, I I just don't get it.

Shay Nehmad:

Especially, since really strong developers are using it as well. It it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a weak developer, whatever that means. Anyway, the survey is out. These are obviously just our opinions and developer sentiment towards Go is very positive still, which is not surprising at all. Alright.

Shay Nehmad:

We have a huge backlog still, but this, is a short show, and we have to cut things somewhere. Let's move to the lightning round. Lightning round.

Jonathan Hall:

You go first. Do you have a video you wanna talk about?

Shay Nehmad:

I have 2 actually. So my first, item for lightning round is, best practices of using Go and Prometheus in Kubernetes. Unfortunately, it's a Hebrew lecture so only if you speak Hebrew you can, watch it and I don't think it even has, like, closed captions. But it's a really good talk, in the Go Israel meetup and I just wanted to shout it out from Aviv Littmann. It was, this month at the Dell.

Shay Nehmad:

Just go powered Prometheus monitoring, best practices for Kubernetes operators. Super super useful, and a pretty good talk. Way to go, Aviv. Go watch it. Next up we have 2 items to sort of talk about the same thing.

Shay Nehmad:

Right? So I found this, video, create a Golang desktop application with whales and react. And you wanted to mention a new tool called gRPCmd GUI.

Jonathan Hall:

Right? Yes. Yeah. I I found this tool just recently. It's a, modern cross platform desktop app for gRPC API development and testing.

Jonathan Hall:

I haven't played with it yet, so it may be crap, but it looks cool. And it's built using WANES. So

Shay Nehmad:

What is WANES?

Jonathan Hall:

What is WANES?

Shay Nehmad:

Is it like FINE? Is it like a It's it's

Jonathan Hall:

kind of like FINE. I I would say it's more like Electron. So it certainly, there's an overlap with fine and that it's about building desktop applications in Go, but it uses,

Shay Nehmad:

what It uses Chrome. It uses Chrome.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I think it uses Chrome under the hood and it uses web technologies. So you'll be writing CSS and HTML and stuff like that. But instead of writing in JavaScript and Node JS as you would for Electron, you can write all your code and go.

Shay Nehmad:

Well, the definitely, the site for, gRPCmd looks really fancy schmancy. And the video is pretty cool as well. There's a link in the in the show notes is from, Bayram. I just found it interesting. There's a gitabrepo super technical video, 30 minutes, just mostly you're looking at Versus Code.

Shay Nehmad:

I like these sort of, videos where someone just sort of shares a screen, you know, screen sharing of their laptop just working on a thing. I don't know if I'll use it, but it definitely seems interesting, especially if you're doing, like, web slash app application, like desktop application, GUI application, you should definitely at least check this out. Cool. So a couple of desktop stuff, not not our usual, thing, with Go, but, very interesting if you're into, app development. Alright.

Shay Nehmad:

Let's jump to a quick ad break.

Jonathan Hall:

Alright. Thanks for listening to Cup of Go. You can always reach us on the web at cup of go dot dev. You can find us on Slack, the go for Slack at the cup o go kebab case, channel. You can email us at news at cup of go dot dev.

Jonathan Hall:

You can buy swag at cup of go dot dev.

Shay Nehmad:

And I wanna give a note about the swag. It is now following the general product safety regulations, requested by the European Union. So you can get your mug with the required safety regulations. Stay safe out there, everybody in the EU. Meanwhile, cuts to US.

Shay Nehmad:

Literally, the president is getting shot, cars exploding, no holds, no bars, no laws, UFC fights.

Jonathan Hall:

That's right.

Shay Nehmad:

Dana White and Joe Rogan screaming at the top of their voice. Cut to the EU council. We really think Jonathan and Shai should put more safety labels on their mug. People could get hurt. Anyway, so we did the thing.

Shay Nehmad:

I said I'll do, like, 2 months ago, and now you can buy our swag in the EU again. So buy our swag in the EU again. We have cups. We have a t shirt. We have a hoodie, which is my number one worn item for 2024 just because I had one at the office at every given day, and the the white version, which I really like.

Shay Nehmad:

We have some stickers. Shout out to Ariel Kurtz, who just got, 2 stickers for free. Has been listening to the show recently. If you schmooze me enough, or your wife works at my team at work, you might get some free stickers as well. But there there are less roundabout ways to get them.

Shay Nehmad:

Just go to the swag store and get some. And what else? Oh, we have a wireless charger. I'm not saying wireless chargers because we literally sold 1.

Jonathan Hall:

Sold 1. Yes. Yes.

Shay Nehmad:

And I like at home, I have just the Amazon Basics ones. So I won't I won't get one. Yeah. So you can get some swag. We thought about doing some promotions or whatever, but we couldn't find any good theme.

Shay Nehmad:

So if you have any idea for a promotion, let us know. We'll we'll might do one. Because we missed the birthday.

Jonathan Hall:

You did. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Alright. So that's about the swag. What else?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Shay Nehmad:

For sure. For sure. That helps us, climb the ranks.

Jonathan Hall:

If you'd like to support us more directly, this is a kind of expensive hobby for us. Can also become a Patreon. Don't we have a new one, Shay?

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. We do have a new Patreon member, jose_d_s. Thanks for joining our our, beautiful Patreon. Thank you for your patronage.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

I guess that's a good way to say it. Yeah. It's $8 a month. Helps cover editing fees, hosting fees, and just sorta our time that goes into the show. And finally, you can also share the show with, like, a friend or a colleague or a co student or whatever, just to get it spread the word around.

Shay Nehmad:

We're nearing up, 20 25 is gonna be our 3rd year of doing this show, which is pretty insane.

Jonathan Hall:

It is pretty insane.

Shay Nehmad:

And we're also nearing up on the 100th episode. And your support has been, definitely instrumental in keeping this going and increasing its quality by, like, hiring an editor and and doing all this cool stuff. So thanks a lot for that.

Jonathan Hall:

And I think we'll we'll be talking about, sort of brainstorming, our our next year and the next segment. So if you wanna stick around just with that, don't worry.

Shay Nehmad:

A bit of a meta conversation, if you will. Alright? Alright. We have this new year coming up. It will include episodes.

Shay Nehmad:

It will definitely include news, and it will include interviews. Our 1st year of doing this show, we had a stumper question.

Jonathan Hall:

Your answers to our standard questions that we ask all of our guests on this show. If somebody held a gun to your head that, Adelina, you must remove some feature from Go, what would you take out?

Shay Nehmad:

And from the other side, this is what you would remove, but what feature is missing? What feature would you take from other programming languages or libraries then put into Go? And back then, it was about features. Right? And we ended up just asking enough people all of the features on both of the lists.

Shay Nehmad:

Yes. Then 2024, we changed it up into actually, you came up with this one, which I really like, about sort of how they started.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. What was the your biggest surprise or or challenge when learning Go?

Shay Nehmad:

And we need to come up with a new one for 2025. That's the stumper question.

Jonathan Hall:

What's the stumper question? What should we ask you to stump you?

Shay Nehmad:

I'm I'm wondering. I think maybe we can take it like, the first two questions have been about what do you think, about Go. Right? Like, how did Go affect you? Maybe we can do it the other way around.

Shay Nehmad:

Maybe you could be like, what is your work or your contribution or whatever is doing for Go? Like, how what effects would you like to see on the Go community or the Go language that relate to you? Like, if we interview someone, does meetups or or a open source package. But maybe some people just program and they don't really wanna affect the Go language.

Jonathan Hall:

Maybe it would a a a separate question. This might be too selective.

Shay Nehmad:

Why do you also hate, JetBrains?

Jonathan Hall:

How will you most be remembered by the Go community? Something along

Shay Nehmad:

those lines.

Jonathan Hall:

I'm so excited. Yeah. It's not quite quite what I'm going for, but what what's what's the contribution what's the greatest contribution you've made to the Go community? The problem is it's kind of a leading question and, like, some people aren't gonna be comfortable answering that even if they have made a big contribution.

Shay Nehmad:

I think that the Go community thing really suggested, like, open source and talks and things like that. But a lot of the contribution could be I've mentored someone at work or I've hired someone. So that's a good option. You know what? We did at the survey, we did, what do you use AI assistance for?

Shay Nehmad:

Right? Let me do that. Put on, like, elevator music while I'm typing. What is a good general interview question about a programming language? In this case, go The previous 2 for interviewing someone, interview for a podcast.

Shay Nehmad:

The previous two questions were, one, if you were to remove a feature and add a feature to Go, what would they be? The fact that it was a 2 parter was pretty difficult. I like to keep it like the 2nd year what we had just what was challenging was better. What was challenging when you started.

Jonathan Hall:

If we'd been smarter, we would have done what would you add for 1 year and what would you remove for another year?

Shay Nehmad:

Yeah. 1 year of positive stuff and 1 year of shitting on the language. Alright. The AI is syncing. Well, it is syncing.

Shay Nehmad:

I I just figured out We could do it the other way around, and we could be, like, who was the person who influenced like, influenced you the most, like, regarding Go?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I like that one.

Shay Nehmad:

The thing about, like, favorite questions, like, who's your favorite whatever, they're not they're not great as, like, conversation starters, but they're great as as conversation enders. Who do you wanna shout out? Who do you wanna

Jonathan Hall:

Who's your favorite Go podcast host?

Shay Nehmad:

I think that's gonna

Jonathan Hall:

That would definitely end a lot of conversations and maybe some relationships.

Shay Nehmad:

A house divided. A podcast divided surely cannot stand.

Jonathan Hall:

So I had an I had an idea for a silly question. I don't know. I don't think this is good enough for a year, but we could do it once twice. And that would be, what do you think of the gopher?

Shay Nehmad:

What do you mean? The the Just a mascot?

Jonathan Hall:

What yeah. What's your opinion on the on the on the mascot? That'd be a fun question. I don't think it's one we should do every time. I think we're gonna get 2 or 3

Shay Nehmad:

I don't have any opinions about the mascot. It's just

Jonathan Hall:

just I've

Shay Nehmad:

looked at it for 10 years at this point. It's just Yeah. Is the the mascot. Right? I think I think what influenced you the most or or who, like, who do you wanna shout out in the Go community or at work or whatever?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I like the I like that one. I like maybe who has influenced you the most in your Go journey or something along those lines.

Shay Nehmad:

Let's let's try to refine that. So, like, who influenced you the most? That could be interesting because it could be an influencer, like, literally that guy on YouTube who does what's his name? Primogenogen, whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Yeah.

Shay Nehmad:

Just people, like, who actually or us. Right? People who do content. Mhmm. Although we just tell news.

Shay Nehmad:

So I I I'd be surprised to hear if we actually influence someone. Because we're trying to be unbiased, unless we're talking about JetBrains, of course. Right. Me just tanking the possibility of them ever, like

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, that shit is sales. Sponsored in the show. They're never gonna sponsor us.

Shay Nehmad:

And it could be, like, oh, my previous boss at work who introduced me to Go and could be, oh, I had a conference talk this year which really inspired me. And it could even be, like, oh, the series of blog posts or I just saw this person maintaining this library and I was so I'm I'm interested. I people I wonder if most people have that. Let let me stump you. Who's the person who influenced your Go journey the most?

Jonathan Hall:

If I had to point to a single person, it would probably be Dave Cheney.

Shay Nehmad:

Dave Cheney.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. So you can plug those. Some of his blog posts were really instrumental when I was starting with Go and it wouldn't, influence the way I think about Go. Error handling, I remember, is one of his blog posts, blogging, some of that stuff.

Shay Nehmad:

That's good. That's good. That's a good, like, stumper conversation editor because it it it it puts a nice ribbon over all the

Jonathan Hall:

So how about you? How would you answer the question? Who has been the biggest influence on you with regard to Go?

Shay Nehmad:

Well, it's a bit cheesy because you're asking, but I guess it's you. Because I I've like, I've written Go because of people in the army, and I've chosen it for my previous startup, which was a big influence. But I looked at it just as another programming language and not as a community and, an endeavor and a thing to actually learn and take part of. Like, I thought about Go in the same way I think about, like, terminals today. Just a thing I use.

Shay Nehmad:

Right?

Jonathan Hall:

Right. Right.

Shay Nehmad:

And I have my favorite, and I know which ones are slow and which ones are fast and the and, like, whatever. But it it was just a a tool for me. And just working with you on the podcast and meeting all these people and then flying out to, like, Amsterdam and actually meeting you in person, these are things that have completely changed my, Go journey from just being an okay ish Go developer to being, like, a person in the Go community and taking part in the meetups and whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

That reminds me I wanted

Shay Nehmad:

to start that.

Jonathan Hall:

That reminds me of I'm wanting to start a podcast about terminal news. Do you wanna help me with that?

Shay Nehmad:

Like JFK, LaGuardia. This week, Tom Hanks' character is still stuck collecting quarters. Alright. I think we have it.

Jonathan Hall:

I think we've had a good question. Yeah. Let's see how the community reacts. They have a chance to to tell us it's a it's a terrible idea before our first interview, but I I think I like it.

Shay Nehmad:

For sure. Who is the person who's been the biggest influence in your, Go journey? I'll try to refine it a bit more for for our first interview in 2025. And yeah. Happy New Year.

Shay Nehmad:

Thanks for listening, everybody. We're back on track. We should be back to regularly scheduled programming until our 100th episode, which should be, like, a month

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. From now,

Shay Nehmad:

something like that, a month and a half, where we plan to do a huge live Bonanza episode. Make sure to not miss that. When once we have a date, we'll put it on the calendar. And I think that's it for us.

Jonathan Hall:

Alright. Good to see you again, Chime.

Shay Nehmad:

Good to listen to you 2. This is they don't see the audio of the rest of the people. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. True.

Shay Nehmad:

Program exited. Goodbye.