Cup o' Go

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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

Shay Neymar:

This show is supported by you. Stick around till the ad break to hear more about that. This is Capago for 12/12/2025, where I we're gonna have to change that pretty soon to 2026, and then the first month is gonna be all editing errors.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, no.

Shay Neymar:

It's like, oh, oops, 2026. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about fifteen minutes per week. I'm Shain Ahmad.

Jonathan Hall:

I'm Jonathan Hall.

Shay Neymar:

How are you doing?

Jonathan Hall:

I am super excited about GopherCon. I know when it's gonna happen in 2026. I know where it's gonna happen, and I'm not telling you.

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. You're the first to know.

Jonathan Hall:

I am. And and if you stick around till the end of the show, you will be the within the first batch to know with an exclusive interview.

Shay Neymar:

To know as well. I was supposed to be part of that interview, but I actually went to my first ballet ever.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. He chose to do a ballet instead of learning about GopherCon. So, you know, choices. Yeah. How was the ballet?

Shay Neymar:

I mean, it was the best one I've ever been to.

Jonathan Hall:

Hard to deny that.

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. I don't I I mean, I I can appreciate the arts and whatever. I don't think I'm I'm sophisticated enough to understand all the nuances. But it was it was nice. It was nice.

Shay Neymar:

Nutcracker, very

Jonathan Hall:

The Nutcracker is a confusing story to me anyway. I've I've I've seen a movie version. I've seen the ballet once performed by, like, high school students. I never understood the story.

Shay Neymar:

So it was a light version because I took my we took my kid, our kid. It was like a one hour trimmed down version. So that was nice. I think it was understandable. Nice.

Shay Neymar:

But it's it was nice. But I missed the interview, so I don't know. When will I learn about this?

Jonathan Hall:

You will learn about it at same time our our listeners do, I suppose. When you listen to this episode, we're recording right now.

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. Let's get to it.

Jonathan Hall:

Let's do it. So first up, do you ever write web software, Shai?

Shay Neymar:

Web servers? I've been known to dabble it in the last, like, thirteen years or whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Do you have a favorite framework for doing it?

Shay Neymar:

That's a tough question. Is it cold fusion? It's like, I guess if I had to, it would be like visualbasicasp.net with Microsoft Access. No, I'm just kidding. Of course, it's static HTML files.

Shay Neymar:

Static HTML files. We

Jonathan Hall:

have this blog post from Efron Licht, came out this month. Gin is a very bad software library, which already kind of hot take y, but the subtitle or actually the title of chapter one, yes, this blog post has chapters, is even better. It says Jin is the software equivalent of athlete's foot.

Shay Neymar:

Okay, so before we start bashing it, what even is like Gin?

Jonathan Hall:

Yes, good question. So Gin is a web framework. You might have picked up on that if you didn't already know for Go. And it's been around for a very long time, which is one of the things that the article talks about. I remember when I first started learning Go and I searched for like web frameworks and how to write web apps, Gin was one of the things that came up along with Martini and Echo.

Jonathan Hall:

Revel and Echo and probably others. So Jen has a long history in the Go ecosystem, and the author of this post doesn't have very many nice things to say about it. So I'm not gonna I have honestly haven't read the whole thing. It's a it's a very long post, as I alluded to, with the fact that it has chapters. But guess I'll start with the little bit of grace that the post offers to Jyn, and that is to say that it is an old framework and a lot of the mistakes that the author believes exist in Jyn predate, you know, maybe common wisdom in the Go ecosystem that we have now.

Jonathan Hall:

One example I like to give is the way Gin handles context. It does it in a way that isn't very idiomatic, but that's largely because it was created before Go had context. So you kind of have to forgive it for that.

Shay Neymar:

Main thing I think a lot of people are having a moment right now, like, with complexity. So I think about, I don't know, two years ago, the entire industry woke up about Kubernetes and was like, hey, you should really wait before starting to use, Kubernetes. Like, we need simpler software and it's just complex for no reason, resume driven development, whatever. I think, like, grabbing a web framework, assuming developing web services has a ton of things you need to do is is it's just sort of not true. And in languages that are very verbose, I wouldn't understand why you would reach to it.

Shay Neymar:

But honestly, a web service is like, okay, there's a function, there's a route. Normally, there's immediately, like, authentication, right, and authorization. You and, you know, you build it once, you build it twice, and then you don't wanna build it from scratch again. So you reach, for, you know, a library that does that. And it's very important to note that this blog post doesn't say don't do that.

Shay Neymar:

That that this blog post definitely says, oh, use Gorilla mux, for example, which we talked about on the show in the past because it got archived and then unarchived. Right? Someone else picked it up. But it's like, oh, it's a really good request router and dispatcher because it looks very Go ish and it's kinda does it's not a full batteries included sort of framework. And even other frameworks are okay, in my opinion.

Shay Neymar:

But I honestly really agree with this blog post about

Jonathan Hall:

So I yeah. I I I have I have things to say about that. So first off, I I tend to agree that Gin is a terrible use of software. I was using it on a very recent project. It has all sorts of weird quirks.

Jonathan Hall:

It's not idiomatic. It's weird. I don't like it.

Shay Neymar:

Oh, so why did you pick it? Or was it, like, already existing in the project?

Jonathan Hall:

It was already there when I when I joined the project. Yeah. However, I don't think that this post does a quite fair comparison, at least on all points. It has spent a fair amount of time comparing the standard libraries, net HTTP package against Gin and how Gin is like over a million lines of code. It's longer than the King James Bible, which is probably true.

Jonathan Hall:

But like, I wouldn't like choose my religion because it, you know, the text is longer than the other one or whatever either. Right? So I don't think that's really a fair comparison.

Shay Neymar:

I mean, you choose your religion in a way that makes way more sense, randomly based on the country and the family in which Exactly you were

Jonathan Hall:

where I was born. That's how I choose my frameworks too. My father's father used djinn and his father before him. But to your point, maybe you do want a framework to handle some of this stuff for you. The standard library, maybe the standard library at large handles these things for you, request binding and error handling and logging and all this stuff, but the net HTTP package doesn't.

Jonathan Hall:

So comparing GIN to net HTTP or any framework to net HTTP alone isn't really a proper comparison or for that matter comparing GIN to relmux because relmux is more or less just a replacement for part of net HTTP. All that to say, though, I do in broad strokes agree with the post that Gin is not a great piece of software. I would never choose it for a new project for a number of reasons that I will not rant on about here, because you can go read the blog post.

Shay Neymar:

And definitely, you know, I think it's one interesting part about that blog post, and honestly, the part that made me like stop in my tracks, was the pictures of the whiteboard. Yeah. Did you see that? It's not even a whiteboard, it's a chalkboard, like an old- A

Jonathan Hall:

chalkboard, yeah, with colored chalk.

Shay Neymar:

I stopped and I was like, you know what's a crazy thing? I looked at it and I was like, man, someone like AI generated chalkboard. And then I like looked at it and I think it's real because the the chalk, like, you know, the the erase, like the little leftover chalk after you erase it with, an old eraser. Yep. Looks real.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, I

Shay Neymar:

I think Now, it's like, this is a cool way to because it was probably would have been so easy to to do it, like, with code. It's just an a really interesting way that showed me, oh, the person who wrote it actually sat down and wrote it on a chalkboard, and didn't even give up on the opportunity to bash gin in the chalkboard with the HTTP example being get slash gin bad. HTTP wants to stop one.

Jonathan Hall:

And and to be clear, it's not because this person doesn't know how to, you know, do CAD or whatever. They have some computer generated diagrams in here too. So this person is just multi multi talented.

Shay Neymar:

And generally, again, going back to what I said about people, like pushing back on complexity, the conclusion for this blog post, which I really like, was figure out the problem before you reach for a solution and don't take a library that's really big for a problem that's really small. Like, if you wanna solve routing, just grab GorillaMux. Don't grab a whole web framework. And that there is a cost for dependencies. Anybody who's like me and managing also React like a full stack app, right, just got burned twice in the last two weeks with, huge CVEs that, you know, luckily we're not a TypeScript podcast, but if we were, we would talk about them.

Shay Neymar:

And, you know, just not having a dependency means you're not gonna have that happen for you. So I I I really agree with the conclusion. Anyway, good blog post, very ranty. I like it a lot.

Jonathan Hall:

Awesome. Speaking of bad software libraries.

Shay Neymar:

No. No. I disagree. Bun is great. Bun is great.

Shay Neymar:

I like it.

Jonathan Hall:

I'm gonna try to change your opinion on that. I found a bug in it that

Shay Neymar:

So what is Bun?

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Bun. So Bun is a fair apparently a fairly popular ORM. I've never used it until a recent project to Go ORM. I've only ever used Gorm and I think I used Gorp on one project a long time ago as far as Go ORMs go.

Jonathan Hall:

But apparently Bun is fairly popular and I'm really curious why, because it's just rubbed me the wrong way all over the place lately. But I found a bug, and actually, I found what I consider to be two bugs, one that really annoys me and the one that I reported. The one that really annoys me is that if you have a type that implements a valuer interface, that is, you you can like do custom scanning or custom you can generate custom SQL representation of your type through with the standard library database SQL package and that value function returns an error, BUN does not report that error to you. Instead, it injects it into your generated SQL.

Shay Neymar:

Oh, that's not good.

Jonathan Hall:

No, it's not good. So that's that's annoying because if you have a type, you know, let's say you have an enum as an example, or obviously you don't have that because we're using Go, but imagine you did have an enum and somehow your in memory version was not a valid representation of that enum, so you wanted to produce an error rather than send the invalid enum to to the wire. Right? Mhmm. That's not possible with Bun.

Jonathan Hall:

You can't generate an error or you can generate it, but it's it's it's injected into the SQL. The bug I reported was that it's actually possible to do SQL injection that way.

Shay Neymar:

Now it's Oh, so it's a security issue, not just a bug. It's a security issue.

Jonathan Hall:

It's not just annoying, swallowing up your errors. There's actually a potential security problem.

Shay Neymar:

Wait, wait, wait. I I don't like this because I'm the security guy on this show. What's I

Jonathan Hall:

know. But you like buns, so I don't understand this.

Shay Neymar:

So first of all, you opened this two weeks ago, and it's been sort of languishing on the backlog as backlog of the show as, you know, other things happened. And I was kind of okay with it because I was I was like, you're reporting a sequel injection, so I was sure something was gonna happen. But it's been two weeks, I'm not seeing any any bites on the the issue.

Jonathan Hall:

Which I suppose leads straight into my second reason I don't like BUN, and that is it's full of security problems and it has been for a very long time. There are multiple CVEs open against it, and, so I would never use BUN in production software. Damn. Aside from the annoying API and the fact that it follows error messages and stuff like that, it looks to me like it's a very poorly maintained piece of software with security problems.

Shay Neymar:

That's a fair, like, if that's your experience, that's, you know, a fair recommendation. Yeah. I used it in the past mostly because I don't want ORMs with, DSL. So, you know, Gorem is a great example. Because what I find is, my my bad experience started from Python's infamous Django.

Shay Neymar:

Right? Mhmm. So you start with Django when you don't know anything and you're like, okay, I have to learn Python and I can either also learn SQL or just use the ORM. So I'll just use the ORM. You start your project.

Shay Neymar:

If it's unsuccessful, who cares? If the project is successful, it grows. And then a year in, suddenly, you know, you have performance issues or you have security problems in your queries and you can't like, if the ORM doesn't let you do what you want, you can't you can't do anything. You just you have to work with the ORM and you find yourself, like, putting a breakpoint right before the SQL is executed on some internal driver library just to read what SQL is generated and be like, no, that's not the sort of join I want or why can't you figure out I need the CTE here or whatever.

Jonathan Hall:

Which is why I don't like dorm forums in general for the for that

Shay Neymar:

sort I don't like ORMs in general either. The thing that's nice about Bunn is, theoretically, you should be able to define your things in SQL and then generate them like SQL C. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Hall:

So I I mentioned that we have I found a bunch of security problems. Some of them were fixed in the most recent version of BUN. So I tried to upgrade to the most recent version of BUN, that exposed another bug that has already been reported. I had to actually debunify a couple of core queries in our code so that I could upgrade to the less insecure version that still has this problem.

Shay Neymar:

So generally, it seems like this episode's theme is d recommendations. Don't don't gin and don't bun.

Jonathan Hall:

So let me just finally summarize the SQL injection I discovered. When it injects the error message into the SQL, which it shouldn't be doing, that's what it does, it prefaces it with an exclamation point question mark. So normally that would be an invalid SQL, and that's what I that's how I discovered it. I was getting syntax errors for weird things. However, in Postgres, you can create custom operators and question mark exclamation point can be a valid operator in Postgres.

Jonathan Hall:

So if you have a custom operator with that signature, you could actually be injecting valid SQL into your code. And I have demonstrated how you could inject nefarious queries. So Yeah.

Shay Neymar:

It is it is fair to know that this is not like a put, you know, a single apostrophe in and then you own the DB. This is like a pretty

Jonathan Hall:

This would be very difficult to very difficult to exploit. You would have to be code where your valuer is returning an error and you control the error and you can, you know, make it nefarious and they have this custom operator. Not a high priority.

Shay Neymar:

Would definitely say this. As time goes on, I become much more, of a database maximalist. Every, year that I, do more software development, I wanna do less things in the language, and more things in SQL, if I'm dealing with the database. And by the way, the the more time goes on, the less I become fond of other databases and the more I find myself liking Postgres. I mean, yeah, there are cases where you have to have huge scale with, like, Clickhouse or, Source, whatever, single source.

Shay Neymar:

But I just really like Postgres and I just really like SQL and these are, like, very evergreen skills. So now I'm not using an ORM at all. And I think if I started a new Go project, I would definitely go just SQL C and nothing else.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. I agree.

Shay Neymar:

Cool. Alright. One final news item that I wanna bring up, which is not news at all because it's from, like, four months ago, but somehow I missed it, is a a Reddit post, about Reddit. So it's like a very meta, like, I'm so meta even this acronym, which if you, have back end in a big, company in Python and you're trying to convince someone, oh, we need to rewrite it in Go, Here's a good example. So, they tell about Katie Shannon, they tell about, like, the one of the core, models, in Reddit.

Shay Neymar:

They have four of them, comments, account, posts, and subreddits, which, like, makes sense. Right? Mhmm. They just rewrote comments, in Go, which is you know, it's an interesting story of the migration. These large scale, like, migrations that involve data at rest are always kind of difficult.

Shay Neymar:

Mhmm. So, you know, Katie goes into detail about, like, okay, migrating read is pretty easy. You reimplement the read and then you send, like duplicate some percent of the traffic to the new endpoint. And if all the time the response is exactly the same, then there's not going to be impact. But how do you do that on write, especially in an architecture like Reddit, where they have Postgres and Memcached and Reddit for CTC events, blah blah blah.

Shay Neymar:

It's like a pretty complex data architecture. They found a nice way to do it. They just, like, duplicated all the data stores and then compared them. So it does go into the cost of writing a migration like that, which is interesting because, you know, you do have to say, like, if you're considering doing something like this in your company, I think people won't really be against it because they think Go is worse than Python Right. In any, like, runtime metric.

Shay Neymar:

And I think at this point, most people understand that Go is pretty simple. Like, you can take a Python dev and turn them into a Go dev in a week. It's maybe not an expert, but enough to write pretty good code.

Jonathan Hall:

Mhmm.

Shay Neymar:

But people care about the cost. So sharing like, okay, this is the process, this is all what we need to write, it's gonna cost whatever, it's gonna be good. Obviously, the, part that people will will wanna glaze over is like the, gratuitous, benchmarks. And, yeah, you you open up the p 99, like, comparison of of time and CPU and Go blows Python out of the water. I assume because of the language itself, but also, you know, it's a rewrite of an old thing.

Shay Neymar:

Maybe it's just better also in terms of how they did things inside their architecture, although they don't go into that. So it might just be a one for on rewrite. And there's lessons learned here and everything. It's just a really good blog post. So the the well, I'm saying blog post.

Shay Neymar:

It's a Reddit thread.

Jonathan Hall:

It's blog post length.

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. It is blog post ish.

Jonathan Hall:

So to summarize, don't use gin, don't use bun, and don't use Python. Is that basically the conclusion for today's episode?

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. Honestly, pretty good advice for a long and healthy life. I do wanna say that it is funny thinking I'm thinking of Reddit always as like this extra fluffy thing, you know, community Reddits for for nonsensical cat pictures and the place to waste time and sort of, are, like the archetype of a social network that's it's I like it, I use it, but it's not like an important thing. And it's very, I I don't wanna say funny because it's it's true for them. Reddit works pretty well.

Shay Neymar:

Like, I don't remember a lot of times where I opened it and it didn't work, so shout out to the Reddit engineering team in general. But it's funny reading this and being like, the critical services with, you know, the actual things that are being powered is like, am I the asshole post, you know? Yeah. You're you're Maybe that's critical critical subreddits. I don't know.

Shay Neymar:

But to me, it was just funny because for them, for Reddit engineering, of course, they consider it as critical. I don't know if Reddit is critical for

Jonathan Hall:

Reddit is usually critical of anything I post on there. That's good. Alright. Stick around. We have a interview.

Jonathan Hall:

Shy, you stick around too. You have to listen to this interview that I had with Eric and Johnny about GopherCon. You will learn in the interview when and where the next one is happening. I'm not going to spoil it. Stick around for the interview.

Jonathan Hall:

Don't go anywhere after our outbreak.

Shay Neymar:

As I mentioned at the top of the show, you can support this show, by doing various things. This is a hobby, we do it for fun, but it is kind of expensive paying for editing, hosting, whatever. So the best way to support us is directly via Patreon. You can kick in a few bucks a month, and that just helps us cover the costs. We really appreciate all our existing Patreons.

Shay Neymar:

Thank you. You're wonderful. You can find the link to the Patreon and the past episodes with transcripts and our Slack channel, hashtag Cupago, kebab case with hyphens, all that stuff@cupago.dev. And if you wanna email us, you can email us at news@kapago.dev. Other ways to support the show, including, buying our swag and wearing it to various tech conferences and meetups, wearing it and or sticking it and or putting it on your head, or, you know, on the Internet leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or whatever you use to listen to podcasts.

Shay Neymar:

We don't pay for advertising, so, you know, the show only grows from

Jonathan Hall:

How do you leave reviews on your swimming earbuds or, you know Oh, I have had a comment about that.

Shay Neymar:

I don't know, but maybe you can do it with, like, you know, a, hey, whatever, you know, Google, Alexa, Siri, whatever your imaginary friend is, is called these days. But yeah, just, try to get the show to more people because we really like it when that happens. Just a few short programming notes before we jump into this, interview that you all are waiting for. First of all, we're gonna take another break, not next week, but next next week, because it's Christmas. I didn't do that last year because, you know, I didn't celebrate it then.

Shay Neymar:

I still don't celebrate it now, but I'm in America, so, you know, it's more of a You commercial

Jonathan Hall:

can't do anything else anyway because all the stores are closed and

Shay Neymar:

Yeah. I might be skiing in Tahoe. I really hope that'll happen. Nice. But even if not, even if I'll just, you know, walk around my neighborhood, apparently, my neighborhood, in California is like the most beautiful Christmas neighborhood in the state.

Shay Neymar:

Like, people come from outside California to look at it and I didn't even know, so that's nice. So we're gonna take a break, where you're gonna have another week without us, unfortunately, in a couple of weeks. Another important day that's coming up is our three year, birthday for the show, which is crazy. I don't even, like, how did that happen? It it does.

Shay Neymar:

Last time we did, like, a live episode, I don't think a ton of people showed up but it was fun, we did video. If you have any ideas how we should celebrate the three year mark of the show, drop them in Slack. Like, we we wanna hear what you wanna hear. Oh, that's good. That's a good line.

Jonathan Hall:

We wanna hear what you

Shay Neymar:

wanna We wanna hear what you wanna hear. That's that's really good. And another thing coming up in January is the Go San Francisco meet up. So if you're in San Francisco, join the San Francisco channel on Slack or follow the Go SF group. Again, I'm arranging it, as if I have the extra time, which I don't.

Shay Neymar:

So, you know, any help would be appreciated. I think we're still we even still have, a call for papers open, but I have to see. Cool stuff. So I'm I'm waiting to hear this interview, man. I wanna know about the go, the GopherCon.

Jonathan Hall:

Alright. Well, let's stop delaying here. Listen now. Hey, Shai. Shai.

Jonathan Hall:

Shai, where are you? Oh, I just saw the notification. Chai, is it the ballet? Oh my goodness. I guess I'll have to talk to you guys then, Johnny and Eric.

Jonathan Hall:

Thanks for joining.

Erik St. Martin:

I'm sorry. We're used to being second place. That's it. It's alright.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Yeah. That's fine.

Jonathan Hall:

That's fine. Well, guys are involved with Gopher Con. I'm going to let you guys fill in the blanks there though. Who wants to go first with the intros and tell us a little bit about who you are, how you're involved with Go and with the Gopher Con.

Erik St. Martin:

I guess I can kick it

Jonathan Hall:

off. Awesome.

Erik St. Martin:

So yeah, I have a long history with Go, guess. I worked at Disney and we started playing with it early on, me and some coworkers in like 2009, 2010, late two thousand and nine, early twenty ten when it was first released. Seemed interesting, didn't really pick it up then. 2011, I started working for a company where somebody had built a service in Go as a hobby project that got put in production and nobody else wanted to work on it and I love picking up new languages and technologies so I was like, sure, why not? I'll look at it.

Erik St. Martin:

That's really when I started loving especially at the time. There was really no silver bullet that made you like sell Go and then really was working with it every day and kind of picking up sort of idioms and realizing how great some of the stuff was. Really, I came from the Rails world before that and so they sort of had like that convention over configuration sort of nature and so but there wasn't a lot of foot guns in Go I loved. Then as far as is GopherCon goes, I know this story's been shared a couple of times, but mid two thousand thirteen, I worked with a guy named Brian Kelson and we were chatting about conferences because both of us went to lots of conferences for database technologies and other programming languages, Ruby Rails, stuff like that and like, I wish there was a Go conference, right? Like back then there wasn't one and nobody really knew how many people were using the language back then.

Erik St. Martin:

And so we had talked about it and then we posted on Twitter, like we really wish there was a conference and some people in Denver, like you guys should start one. And, you know, as two engineers, we were like, well, how hard could that be? Right. You know, just organizing a conference turns out way harder than we thought, way more risk. I I took about a year to plan the first one.

Erik St. Martin:

I took some serious time off of work the first year to make the first one happen. But yeah, so that's how it kicked off. I know we talked about in the green room a little bit, war stories and stuff. I'll just share this one because it's fitting in the the sort of origin story. So originally we didn't know how many people and so we're like, I don't know, two, three hundred people would be crazy.

Erik St. Martin:

Right? It sold out very, very quickly and I had to keep calling the hotel and making room for more people and so then it became 400 people and it became 500 people and then became like, what's the maximum number of people? And it ended up being like seven fifty ish people that we got there the very first year. Mitchell Hashimoto was the first person to buy tickets, which was crazy to us. But yeah, so seven fifty people the first year.

Erik St. Martin:

We never really thought about how much work it was to pack like seven fifty swag bags. So the first year was like people from the go team and sponsors and everybody else were just sort of like all hands on deck trying to help make that happen. So I think that really set the sort of framework for the community too, is like how much everybody was just so excited for this to finally be happening to kind of jump in and do that. So I guess that kind of encompasses year one. I'll let Johnny introduce himself, but the kind of

Johnny Boursiquot:

Yeah, I'm, I am one of the, wow. I didn't go back and think. I I kinda have to go with my LinkedIn to see when I started using Go, but I kinda started I got on the bandwagon like pretty early on, like maybe pre one point zero days. And I just basically Pre Go tool. Pre, pre, I mean, yeah, those were the days, man.

Johnny Boursiquot:

So yeah, when I heard that there was a Go conference going on, an old friend of mine, Mark Bates, back in the Boston area, he was like, Hey, let's take the training or actually let's fly down to Denver to attend the first school conference. So I was attending the first school conference and yeah, it was by comparison to how big they've been over the years, that was small by comparison. But listening to Eric, I'm like, yeah, that was no small feat, right? But yeah, I got involved and one of the, basically one of the things that attracted me to the community, prior to that I had been part of the Ruby community and others beyond that. One of the things that attracted me to the Go community was basically how welcoming it was.

Johnny Boursiquot:

And there was a spirit of like teach the next person kind of thing going on, you know, as you might sort of get with a nascent language, know, new technology, Everybody's excited about it. Everybody wants to sort of help each other learn how to use the language effectively. And the speakers were awesome, basically talking about, you know, stories of this is how we put things into production. This is what we're experiencing. There was a sort of the spirit of learning and exploration that I kind of miss frankly nowadays.

Johnny Boursiquot:

But it's that sentiment sort of stayed with me. And from then on, I basically decided to sort of make the Go community sort of my home, so to speak, in terms of, my community involvement. I got into soon after I got into trying to trying to teach people and and and, you know, because one of the best ways to learn is is is to, you know, know how to teach something, right? Forced you

Shay Neymar:

to sort

Johnny Boursiquot:

of dive deep. So yeah, ever since then it's been sort of Comstock Conference and I eventually I started helping MCing and now teach regularly at every GopherCon. So it's been a wonderful journey.

Jonathan Hall:

That's awesome. So I love podcasting because I get to I think I mentioned this last week, I get to ask stupid questions without any shame.

Erik St. Martin:

I like asking stupid questions even when I know the answer to it because everybody else can be entertained by the answer.

Jonathan Hall:

And that's the nice thing about being a podcaster is it's ambiguous whether I know the answer and I'm just asking for the sake of the audience or I'm honestly ignorant. So in the spirit of possibly ignorant questions, it sounds like GopherCon is not an official GO event in the sense that like it's sponsored by Google or I should say hosted by Google, I'm sure they sponsor it. It's not like it's not organized by Google or the Go team. It sounds like it's a grassroots community effort. Is that a fair assessment?

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, so 100% from day one, it has been a community conference. And in fact, that is why it is called GopherCon and not GoCon. So early on when planning the very first one and trying to name it, that was kind of the thing, right? It was a community conference. You see a lot of industry events that are run by professional sort of conference companies and things like that and so this one was by the community for the community and so it was rightfully named after what we call community members, gophers.

Erik St. Martin:

But yeah, so in the early days, basically just a small company that was owned by myself and Brian Kettleson, he stepped away a few years ago so it is just me and Heather who you have talked to, who is our and her team who helped with all of the the conference planning and logistics and all of that stuff. You've seen some messaging behind there. So yeah, it's 100% that that's it. That's us and then a lot of support from the community and teaching and emceeing and boots on the ground and things like that and advice over the years. But yeah, so Google has been involved, since early on the very first year.

Erik St. Martin:

We reached out to them and they sent speakers and and we're more than happy to sponsor and stuff like that, to do this. I think that they love that this stuff is happening more in the community, especially because the language came from them and it's not really like them kind of patting themselves on the back and things like that. So I think they've always had a really good relationship with the conference and other community conferences around the world for Go. So yeah, the team is really, really great. If you've not got a chance to speak with any of them, I absolutely recommend it.

Erik St. Martin:

They are some of the most down to earth cool people you'll ever talk to.

Jonathan Hall:

So to follow-up on that question then, since your original quote unquote original GopherCon, there have been others around the world. We have GopherCon Europe and, you know, it's sort of the GopherCon X, where X is filling your hometown, has sort of popping up all over the world. Have you ever been involved in that and if so, to what extent?

Erik St. Martin:

So some early stuff, the first one was India. They reached out and asked if they could use the name and again, that was I think after the very first year and again, it was like a community conference. It wasn't a business or anything like that. So I was like, sure, of course. Right?

Erik St. Martin:

Like Picon runs icons all over the and stuff like that and so it was kind of like, if you're the only one in your country, sure. Why it gets a little confusing. I don't think at the time I realized how big it would get and now it gets slightly confusing. We'll have people reach out to us about either sponsoring or speaking or something that happened at another GopherCon and you have to kind of explain like, we're not

Jonathan Hall:

really involved in that. Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

In the early days, I knew a lot of the organizers of some of of some of the other ones around the world, nowadays they pop up, I'll see them on Twitter and stuff, I'm like, I didn't even realize there was one there.

Jonathan Hall:

So

Erik St. Martin:

yeah, not as connected but I've been more than happy to offer advice and things like that to people who are trying to get them started. Yeah and even other conferences too. Like I remember chatting with JJ and everybody in the early days of founding of KubeCon too about things we learned trying to start conferences and things. Yeah, there's a lot of things you wish you could unlearn. What hotel attrition is, that's a thing I wish I could unlearn for sure.

Jonathan Hall:

I think you need to elaborate on a little bit of that.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, so what a lot of people don't realize is when you block hotel rooms. Right. So like if you have a large event on hundreds, especially thousands of people, you have to block where they're going to stay. Otherwise, they could sell out. But when you do that, you commit to a certain number of room nights and you pay for them whether people book them or not.

Erik St. Martin:

And so, yeah, if you ever if it ever seems desperate when we're like tweeting and saying like book hotel rooms now, just know that's us behind the scenes, like watching our retirement dissipate, you know? Got it.

Jonathan Hall:

I assume you get a bulk discount. I mean, not that that makes it free to you, like you're probably not paying the advertised price.

Erik St. Martin:

We will negotiate blocks with lower rates for the benefit of like, don't get kick backs on that or anything, but it's for the benefit of attendees. So sometimes that'll go into the decision making too. If we can't get hotels in a city that we're looking at in a reasonable rate, then we won't go there just to trying to keep the costs down for attendees.

Jonathan Hall:

Cool. Johnny, do you have any war stories you can share? That's the reason people are listening. They don't really care where the next one's happening or that's not what they're here for.

Johnny Boursiquot:

They just want war stories.

Erik St. Martin:

They want you to spill the tea, Johnny.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Spill the tea.

Erik St. Martin:

Do I need to walk in the other room so you can just, you

Jonathan Hall:

know? No.

Johnny Boursiquot:

I mean, like, having been sort of part of the inner circle, so to speak, you know, with Eric and Heather and whatnot and kind of seeing sort of the, yeah, the CFB committee and basically we're reviewing talks and everything, for quite a number of years now. You do tend to sort of see and be part of managing sort of mini chaos sort of popping up like throughout basically everything from submissions that you need to sort of have conversations with the submitters to try and say, look, you can't come on stage to advertise your product. Sorry, you can't do that. How about we do this instead to day of the conference, a speaker who's scheduled to speak at a certain time doesn't show up and now we're scrambling to find, you know, the backup and I mean, all

Erik St. Martin:

of these Or the hotel in the federal government asking us about which one of our attendees is trying to hack the naval base across the way.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Then with like the security, like with national, you know, NSA, like walking through the attendees, like picking up somebody and walking them out. Yeah. Yeah. There's been some stuff. So it's, yeah, you tend to, there's like so much of this stuff, but you know, the grace by which, you know, these things have been handled and most attendees, 99.9% of attendees not even knowing that these things are happening behind the scenes, you know, is a credit, is a credit to the people involved in trying to make it happen.

Johnny Boursiquot:

So kudos to them for sure.

Erik St. Martin:

You know what's what's interesting is, early on my in my career, I worked for Disney and every employee there, has to go through something called traditions. It used to be a two day class and they kind of teach you about the history of Disney and the heritage and sort of like sell you on this whole thing that like even people who work there who are in the parks with their kids and stuff like that pick up trash and random things because you're all kind of contributing to the experience of others and they call everybody a cast member because you all play a role in this performance for everybody. And they talk a lot about sort of like not giving away secrets, right? Like you're privy to things when you're backstage seeing things and things people will inevitably ask questions about and stuff and it's basically taught to you that like don't ruin the magic for other people. And so I think that's kind of carried on a little bit too, where you try to fight the fires behind the scenes a little bit.

Erik St. Martin:

Every once in a while we'll give people a glimpse into it. Like everybody was out on break and they come back in and then we show like a picture on the screen of somebody on the scissor lift pulling down the projector that died in the middle of the thing that they didn't realize and you give people kind of a glimpse into it. But for the most part, we try to keep it a little behind the scenes and let everybody else enjoy the experience.

Jonathan Hall:

I mean, even like I've not been to Disney World or Disneyland before and I probably will, but like even there, you still get behind the scenes documentaries occasionally that are interesting, right? Like here's how that ride works And, you know, you know, take a peek behind the curtain. We're not gonna, like, take everybody on a tour, but here's a peek because people are interested. Right?

Johnny Boursiquot:

Right.

Jonathan Hall:

So I'm curious. How how many Gopher Cons have there been now? I I haven't twelve, thirteen. Yeah. Do you have a favorite a favorite venue you've been at?

Erik St. Martin:

Favorite venue. San Diego was really, really nice.

Johnny Boursiquot:

I was gonna say, yeah. That's my favorite.

Erik St. Martin:

San Diego is your favorite. Yeah. Probably a favorite, but Denver was really cool too. I I I was surprised how many people missed going to Denver when we left. Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

So historically, the reason why we were in Denver was, again, this is just sort of like a community thing, started by a couple of programmers who didn't know any better. We didn't want to mess with something that worked, right? Like you didn't really know why that many people showed up there and it's a new risk dealing with new venues, new vendors, all of those types of things. We hadn't really figured everything out. I think we always assumed that somebody who knew what they were doing would come along and start the Go conference and eventually it started crossing 1,200, 1,500, 1,800 people and then you kind of have to be like, we the big one?

Erik St. Martin:

And then sort of, yeah, once we started getting into those numbers, it started being like, I think we're pretty safe to kind of bounce east, central, west and stuff like that, which is why we ended up going to San Diego. Yeah, I was really surprised how many people who were disappointed that we left Denver and want to go back.

Jonathan Hall:

So was Denver the sort of de facto place for a long time then?

Erik St. Martin:

First five years,

Jonathan Hall:

yeah. Yeah, okay. Right?

Erik St. Martin:

2019, is that our first year? Tom's about right. Yeah, think 2019 And was our first

Jonathan Hall:

then last year was New York. Mhmm. I remember shortly after that, there was an announcement that you were discussing possible cities and you included was it Toronto or

Erik St. Martin:

or Yeah. So, yeah. So yeah. Other North American cities outside the The US as well. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Eric,

Johnny Boursiquot:

I I have to call you up, my man. 2014 was the first conference.

Erik St. Martin:

When you said 2019, was like, what? 2019 was the first outside of Denver.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Outside okay. Gotcha. Okay.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah.

Johnny Boursiquot:

I was about to say.

Jonathan Hall:

Prices averted. No. It's '20 Almost came to blows here, guys.

Erik St. Martin:

I know. It's a good

Jonathan Hall:

thing this is audio only.

Erik St. Martin:

I I have that sometimes that likes to kick in, but, this isn't one of those moments.

Jonathan Hall:

So, yeah, I was really rooting for Mexico City because that was one that came up on the list. I've I've been there many times. I used to live in Mexico. I love the food there. You know, it's cheap hotels, relatively speaking, but you ultimately decided not to go to Mexico, at least for now.

Jonathan Hall:

I'm curious if you want to talk a little bit about the process that goes in maybe in general, like how do you choose a city?

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, a lot of it is wanting to make sure that we hit markets so that more local people can go because conferences, there's a huge cost, not just the ticket prices, right? Which we can go into a little bit about like, why is a conference ticket so expensive too, if you want, but you've got the conference, but flight and hotel is huge too. So there's a lot that goes in there. Can we get a good room rate? Do we kind of mix it up and hit different parts of The US so we can get kind of local markets to go there?

Erik St. Martin:

There's a little bit of like how accessible is it internationally and things like that. International, we've not done yet. Looking at North America as a whole seemed very, very enticing. I think that there's a lot of other variables right now too because, you know, we would get a lot of Canadians who can't make it here but how many people from The US would we lose? It's another barrier to entry for anybody who doesn't have passports.

Erik St. Martin:

So there's just like a lot of these types of things that are considerations and so yeah, we were kicking around the idea of Mexico or Canada and wanted to kind of get a feel for what everybody thought there. I think it's still very much on the table for a future year. We want to look around. We probably need to give it a little more time for a first year out of The US and things like that. Mexico would be hard too because the question is it'd be cheap for anybody traveling internationally but it would still be expensive for anybody locally.

Jonathan Hall:

Oh, yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

And so there's a little bit more that I think we just want to chew on a bit before before we go there. But yeah, result it's surprising how much goes into speaker selection and location selection and things like that.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit. How do you choose your speakers? Imagine there's a lot more that goes into that than, you know, somebody like me who might just apply every now and then, you know, here's my great idea. I wanna talk about, you know, whatever library or thing.

Jonathan Hall:

How do you decide? I'm sure there's lot that goes into it.

Erik St. Martin:

There is a ton that goes into it. I don't wanna do all of the talking and being that Johnny serves on the program committee and as a program chair rather frequently, pretty much always. I'll let him take this one because that is an aspect he can speak to as well. So

Johnny Boursiquot:

we usually, the little bit inside baseball, we usually open the request process, pretty early on. We're talking like months, months in advance, like, you know, sometimes even six months out. The, the, what we've learned over the years is that the more time we give people, the more they procrastinate. Because at the end of the day, like it'll still come down to the very last minute, like, you know, on the day of, like literally with like ten, fifteen minutes More

Erik St. Martin:

than 50% of proposals come in like the last forty eight hours, yeah.

Johnny Boursiquot:

They just flood in, right? So over the years we've learned like, you know what, it doesn't matter whether we used to think that, oh, just give them more time because at the end of the day, you know, we see the flood coming in, like, okay, maybe we need give them more time and then that doesn't matter, right? So it's kind of a funny, like curious things. Like the more time people have, they sort of elongate the process, but you know, we've shortened it and we didn't really see a drop in proposal. Matter of fact, we saw a spike, right?

Johnny Boursiquot:

So we saw more proposals than usual over the years. So once the proposals come in, we usually have sort of a blind process. So the evaluations, we have an entire committee that basically goes through them, you know, the hundreds of proposals, basically, you know, we don't know who the proposals are. Basically everything gets evaluated based on the type of content it is and what of schedule, what kind of program we're trying to put together for that year. Because as you might imagine, we're all working tech.

Johnny Boursiquot:

So from one year to the next, the same things basically are not gonna be as popular this year as they were last year, right? So all that factors into sort of the selection process and what kind of content, you know. Have to, believe it not, we have to filter out really nonsensical stuff. Like we have, you know, people who are in a completely different industries trying to submit talks about, you know, I don't know.

Erik St. Martin:

Management or yeah.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Management or social science and, you know, I mean, we see like a ridiculous number of like irrelevant things just because who knows? From an end now.

Jonathan Hall:

Go ahead.

Johnny Boursiquot:

No. I thinking that

Erik St. Martin:

I love this. Latency. Latency. Latency. Go

Johnny Boursiquot:

ahead. Go ahead, Eric.

Erik St. Martin:

So, was just gonna from a numbers perspective, generally between two and three hundred proposals per year, Johnny mentioned the review committee that reviews these blind proposals. That's usually in the order of 25 plus people. So basically everybody reviews it blind. Nobody has any idea anything that is not written in the abstract. So we don't know who you are, who you work for or anything at the time, we just know the topic.

Erik St. Martin:

As Johnny said, we tend to look for a couple of things. What's trending in the industry right now, for instance AI and AgenTeq and MCT things like that are hot. You don't want to saturate an entire event with it either, but you're sometimes you're looking out for it'd be great to have that or, you know, things that are historically underrepresented like security talks, people doing, I don't know, desktop applications and go things like that. There's things you'll see testing, gRPC, some of these types of things you'll see every year and they're still important because a large intersection of the audience is new to the language or new to the conference and so making sure that we're continuously touching on things and we learn new idioms over time, right? And so people's view changes and so those will go in there too.

Erik St. Martin:

Novel uses of Go is always a thing, right? Like some of my favorite things you talk about funny stories and stuff like that. I still remember year one, Ron Evans, who works on Tiny Go and all of this stuff. What was the original one called? What was his original library called?

Erik St. Martin:

Gopher Bot. No, no, no. What was it? I'll remember. But so he originally had a library.

Erik St. Martin:

So Rob Pike, who's one of the original creators of the language, gave a talk and he talked about like what Go was good for and what it would probably never use for. And he said embedded devices. Right? And then like later Ron Evans comes on and he's like, oh, here's what we're doing with this. We've done all this hardware stuff.

Erik St. Martin:

So some of those things are it's really fun to watch people do those. I'm also a huge fan of infotainment. Tiny I know Tiny Goes Current. Tiny Goes Current. It's the one that they they had a Ruby library and other stuff of too.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Oh, yeah. It's in tip of my tongue. He'll come to me.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. Yeah. It'll come to me right about the time we stopped recording. Was like, that's what I lost. But yeah, so some of those novel uses, but yeah, people have to remember when submitting a proposal is everything we know about the topic and your ability to articulate it in a coherent way is in there in the abstract.

Erik St. Martin:

Right? And historically, like, we've we've when we've de anonymized later, there'd be a talk that got rejected by like a very famous person that was like two sentences. It's like, okay. Yeah. They can talk about that.

Erik St. Martin:

We But if we don't know who you are, we have no idea how much you know about the subject or how

Jonathan Hall:

you really good context. I I I'd I'd not thought of that before. I mean, I've submitted proposals to a number of conferences, and I never I hadn't considered that you're you're gonna intentionally block out certain details so you're not, you know, influenced by a famous name or whatever. So, yeah, that's that's good.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. And so so we basically have that. And I will say as part of that process, we rotate those people. There'll be some core chair people who carry over, but most of the reviewers are swapped out, which is good because we need new people to look at this stuff. Otherwise you'd have a lot of the same talks because I'm always going to rate things I'm interested in higher.

Erik St. Martin:

It's hard to be solely objective. So we rotate that out. What we basically do after that is we'll cut the top rated proposals. We'll create a line and then we'll de anonymize and then it'll be like the chair committee. There's usually three or four of us and we'll basically formulate an entire program out of that because there's a lot of variables, right?

Erik St. Martin:

Sometimes some of the top rated talks are written by the same person or there's 17 talks by people who work for Google and it's like, well, you can't have an entire conference of Google speakers or they're all on one topic and so we'll kind of finagle an interesting program from what's there with the highest rated proposals.

Johnny Boursiquot:

And sometimes even some of the highest rated talks, right, because, you know, we're trying to create a sort of a cohesive program, right? Just because it's a great talk and highly rated, that doesn't guarantee that it will actually go in. So at the end of the day, it's still a, still a mixture of art and science, right? Because you kind of have to, you know, otherwise, I mean, if we just went, if we just automate the whole thing with some sort of AI tool or whatever, you know, as most people tend to do these days, we'd have an entire program made up of, you know, agentic AI talks and NLMs, you know, that would be, that would be all you get, right? But you know, obviously the world of going professional programming- All the talks just those things.

Erik St. Martin:

Target advanced people are all beginners and you have to really kind of make sure there's something there for everybody.

Jonathan Hall:

Right. Now, GopherCon is a single track conference, is that correct?

Erik St. Martin:

It is currently, it did not used to be. It started as a single track and then we went multi track for a number of years. Post pandemic it has come back as single track, primarily because of the costs of adding an additional track are significant. Also the energy of being in a room with more people watching the same things as you is entertaining rather than really, really thin small rooms. But yeah, there has been a dip in attendance post pandemic, which has primarily led to it being single track right now.

Erik St. Martin:

The hope is to get it back to multi track.

Jonathan Hall:

My my personal I'm a weird guy. I run a podcast that I would never listen to. And I enjoy speaking at conferences I would never attend. And the reason for the last comment is like, you know, as far as like learning something from a conference, I can get the same content on YouTube at 2x speed and I can hit stop if it's boring. Right?

Johnny Boursiquot:

But are really there to learn content?

Jonathan Hall:

That's the thing, right? But so that's what I'm getting at is what I value most in conferences is actually a single track conference because then I know the person I'm talking to at the coffee machine or at lunch or whatever, we saw the same talk and we know we have common ground. And the extreme, the far opposite extreme would be FOSDEM, the free conference in Europe, which has like 50 tracks. Yeah. And and you never talk to somebody who saw the same talk you did.

Johnny Boursiquot:

No. Too much.

Erik St. Martin:

I I think they're somehow repelled by each other because, like, yeah, I don't think I've ever talked to somebody who saw even one of the same talks that I Exactly.

Jonathan Hall:

So anyway, all that to say, I see pros and cons to both. I mean, with the multi track, you get to pick and choose the ones that are most interesting to you. You're less likely to want to hit stop or to walk out in the middle of a talk. But that hallway track becomes less valuable, at least in my opinion, when there's more tracks like that.

Erik St. Martin:

I think in person conferences appeal for a couple of reasons, right? One, networking, as you said, like that's huge, right? The opportunity to get there and connect with people. Even just the communal aspect of it's great to sit down and hack on stuff with people you've collaborated with solely online to spend some actual face time with people. That's phenomenal.

Erik St. Martin:

But also we're rarely disconnected. Right? Like as engineers, we're constantly multitasking and so to have a couple dedicated days or like focused energy. But again, the goal isn't to learn. Actually, there was a DefCon talk that I absolutely love where he touched on this.

Erik St. Martin:

And the talk was basically about how CPUs work, right? Like how gates are assembled to create other things. But in the intro, he kind of explained this whole talks aren't meant to teach you a thing. They're meant to give you a bunch of hooks. Right?

Jonathan Hall:

Exactly.

Erik St. Martin:

Where like later you run into something, you're like, I watch something on that. Then, you know, and so the whole talk is like, so this makes this. And if you don't know what that is, look it up. Moving on. And it's it's a really, really fun talk.

Erik St. Martin:

I'll share a link to it if I remember the name of it. But, yeah, it was just great. It really put that into context. Like, yeah, I don't I don't need to take all of this in. I just need these little hooks to come back to later when when I need a thing.

Erik St. Martin:

And I'm like, oh, yeah, Johnny gave a talk about something like that. Let me go look that up and watch it and then go down a rabbit hole of researching the things he talked about. Because the reality of it is is you're not going to learn a thing in thirty minutes or an hour.

Jonathan Hall:

Right.

Erik St. Martin:

It's just you need time, hands on. That's just that's the way

Jonathan Hall:

it works. My goal, to the extent that I want to learn from a conference, my goal is I want to learn about a thing that might be relevant so I can go dig in later on. Yeah, exactly. And

Johnny Boursiquot:

honestly, these days, I think it's, like for me personally, even before sort of the current age that we're in as professional technologists, I started realizing like years ago that the interactions and actual in person interactions, and this is even before, you know, like pre pandemic, right? The, like the actual face to face interactions, they started being so much more meaningful to me personally. The, being able to see somebody face to face that I've only interacted with online on a regular basis and actually, you know, these kinds of sort of situations, they present the opportunity to get to know somebody more, right, than just the library that they wrote or the package that you use all the time or, you know, whether the person's popular or not, right? You sit down, if you've ever had the pleasure of sitting out with somebody like Kelsey Hightower, right? You're like, wow, you are a human being with actual human problems.

Johnny Boursiquot:

So just like me, right? We stopped sort of mythologizing those people that are on stage and that might be popular in our community and started realizing, oh, I can sit down and have a beer with this person and there's just like another human being, right? That the importance of that I think is, I'm hoping we don't lose that as a community, right? But that's so important nowadays.

Erik St. Martin:

I think you touched on a point too that I think connects the CFP that we should also mention is if you've been worried about giving a talk because you feel like you're not in a place with your skill level, it's important that you submit one anyway. Yeah. Because the reality of it is, it's like you're not there to give a talk to Rob Pike or Russ Cox or Robert Riesner or any of these guys, right?

Johnny Boursiquot:

Like you probably can't teach them much

Erik St. Martin:

about Exactly. But you're here to bring up the the generation behind you and only you have had your experiences and we can't rehab our experiences. My first experiences with Go along with Johnny's is like before there was a Go tool. Like we wrote Makefile. It's like there was so much stuff.

Erik St. Martin:

Like, if you if you wanted to interact with a database, you were probably writing the driver for it because it didn't exist. It wasn't there. And so we don't have the same experiences that people do. So I can't connect with what it's like to learn Go today.

Jonathan Hall:

Right.

Erik St. Martin:

And so but you can because you just recently experienced it. And so I think that that's incredibly important. Also, if you're new to public speaking, what a lot of people don't realize is we we mentor people. So we regularly have new speakers who will submit and will work with people on crafting their talk and things like that. And even if you want to get your feet wet, we do lightning talks on the main stage every year.

Erik St. Martin:

That's an opportunity. You just got to power through seven minutes and you know.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Awesome. Which is fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

Yeah. Well, my news ticker has some breaking news. I see here that GopherCon twenty six has been scheduled for August '6. Do you want to tell us where this is happening and give us all the details?

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. So this is actually going to be in Seattle, Washington this year. So yeah, we'll be at the, it's referred to as the summit, the SEC summit. So that's the new convention center. If you've not seen it, it's absolutely beautiful.

Erik St. Martin:

It just opened almost just shy of two years ago, I want to say it is. Nice. But yeah.

Jonathan Hall:

Paint's still drying.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, yeah, it is beautiful. If you go look up pictures. Yeah and so we've negotiated some great rates at some of the local hotels. I think we're four blocks from Pike Place, which is really, really popular if you're from that area or if you're not, you've seen it in like every movie that's featured in Seattle ever. It's a couple of blocks away from the monorail stop.

Erik St. Martin:

So yeah, this quite literally is breaking news. The ink is not on the contracts at this moment in time. We're just absolutely confident based on conversations that we've been having that this is what's going to happen and so likely by the time this airs, that will be the case and it'll soon be announced on the website.

Jonathan Hall:

And if it's not the case, let me know and we'll we'll cut the whole interview and start

Erik St. Martin:

over. Yeah. We know the one place it will not be. Right?

Jonathan Hall:

It would

Johnny Boursiquot:

not be. Yeah. For sure.

Jonathan Hall:

That's awesome. So on that topic, you may not know the answer to this precisely, but you already alluded to like ticket prices and how that goes in. Do know what the ticket prices will be? And then more generally, maybe you want to fill us in a little bit about how you arrive at those ticket prices.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, so the ticket prices should be, I'd have to remember specifically what we said on that last year but they should be in line with last year. We don't really tend to raise them unless we absolutely have to. So like as we kind of talked about earlier in the podcast, it's a community ran event. It's not operated for profit or anything. It's not a nonprofit but it's not a thing where decisions are made for there to be leftover.

Erik St. Martin:

This is one of those things like I hate to share and Heather has tried to convince me a boatload of times to share but like I'll give you a little insight like I lost 6 figures last year personally on the conference. So it is it's definitely not a thing that is operated for for profit. So we try to keep the ticket prices right where they need to be to cover costs, cover some buffer if we have some attrition and things like that. If there's leftover, it usually goes into like a party or something like that for attendees. But yeah, costs of conferences are insanely expensive between venue rentals, security, AV, food and beverage.

Erik St. Martin:

If you've ever paid for like a wedding. Yeah. Imagine like those little prices are higher, right? Like 75, dollars 80 a gallon for coffee, 12 to $15 for a can of soda. It's incredibly expensive.

Erik St. Martin:

Inflated. Yeah. So yeah, there's been years we've spent $40,000 on wifi for three days. So yeah, it's incredibly expensive to run. There's a reason why conference prices, especially for the bigger ones are what they are.

Jonathan Hall:

Somebody's making bank, it's just not you.

Erik St. Martin:

Yes, right. I got in on the wrong side of this. I should have had a couple $100,000,000 and built a venue. There

Jonathan Hall:

you But yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

So hug your local conference planner, you know?

Jonathan Hall:

Yes. Yes. When when does the CFP open for this for people who are now inspired to submit?

Erik St. Martin:

So it'll it's probably going be after the new year. Just just with locking down the venue. We try to do that first to get the venue scheduled and everything. But yeah, I'd anticipate shortly after the new year we would. Cool.

Jonathan Hall:

To see So we'll stay tuned for that. We'll try to announce that on the show, of course, once we hear that that's open. We the will dates?

Erik St. Martin:

August 4? August 6.

Jonathan Hall:

August Yeah. Yeah.

Johnny Boursiquot:

And don't wait till the last minute to submit your your

Shay Neymar:

CF proposal.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. All right. More than two sentences. Right.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. Also, one of the next things that we'll do is start securing sponsorship too. So 100%, if you're interested in sponsoring, reach out to me or Heather, or just email infocopheracademy dot com. Cool.

Jonathan Hall:

We will put links to that in the show notes for anybody who's interested. Let's start to wrap this up here a little bit. Before we go into the final question, which I warned you guys about before, is there anything else other than GopherCon sponsorships, CFP and so on that you would like our audience to know about? Your own personal blog or website? Is your company hiring?

Jonathan Hall:

Anything like that?

Erik St. Martin:

I don't know anybody who's hiring right now.

Jonathan Hall:

It's not a thing right now, is it?

Erik St. Martin:

Think that word

Johnny Boursiquot:

is sad, sad,

Erik St. Martin:

Desperately hoping not to be displaced by our AI overlords. Yeah. I can't say that I have anything outside of the conference. Most of what I'm doing at work, we're not really hiring at the moment anyway.

Johnny Boursiquot:

For me, whether or not I have a full time job, I always love to take on sort of new challenges from my own personal development. So, you know, if folks want to reach out to me, if you have a project that you're looking to add some, sprinkle some AI on top of these days, we're all affected by it. And personally I've chosen to sort of dive deep into it and learn some of the intricacies and actually how to build these systems. So if you need help and assistance on that stuff, just reach out and let's talk and maybe I can help out with your next project.

Jonathan Hall:

Great. And what's the best place to reach you at, Johnny?

Johnny Boursiquot:

Johnny@ideomatt.co. And, you know, you can put that in the show notes and for those

Erik St. Martin:

who

Johnny Boursiquot:

Yep. To reach

Jonathan Hall:

And how about you, Eric? Where do we find you online?

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah. I mean, I'm basically Eric St. Martin on all of the socials, although I haven't been using them very much since I left advocacy, but yeah, you can grab me there. I'm on Go For Slack or you can email me ericeric. Dev.

Erik St. Martin:

I stole that one early As soon as .dev came out, it's like it's mine. Nice.

Jonathan Hall:

Nice. Cool. Well, let's move into our final question. I warned you about this ahead of time. I don't think it's gonna be tricky for you guys.

Jonathan Hall:

I hope not. Who has influenced you the most in your Go Journey? Start with you, Eric.

Johnny Boursiquot:

I know I know my answer.

Jonathan Hall:

Your first, Ronnie. Go ahead.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Oh, no. No. No. I'm I'm I'm watching Eric. Okay.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Contemplate. I'm like, it's gonna be

Erik St. Martin:

He's like, I'm I'm gonna say Eric, but if he doesn't say me, then I got my backup over here. Actually, I mean, that's a it's a really interesting question because so many people because I got so involved in it so early on and I've been doing this now for was it over a decade? Close to a decade and a half. Different people have influenced me in different ways. As as Johnny said, Kelsey Hightower, we didn't mention him year one.

Erik St. Martin:

He came over year one and he's like, look like you're struggling because putting out fires and then trying to run up on stage and emcee and he took over and I learned so much from him getting to chat with some of the GOAT team. Many of them I've had really valuable conversations with over the years but if I had to pick my top two, it'd probably be like Russ Cox and Robert Griesmer. I remember having some conversations with them early on that changed my perspective on things. Like I said, very down to earth people. I remember having a conversation one time with Robert Griesmer about like, we idolize people who work on compilers and he's like, I've been writing compilers for thirty years.

Erik St. Martin:

I would hope I'd be good at it by now. You know, he's like, why shouldn't I should find a new job? And, you know, and so that really gave me sort of perspective until like, that's just one person's specialty. Dave Chaney, I don't know whether we brought him up really. I've learned a ton from him from just writing good Go code to, we had some conversations early on about the conference and things like that and yeah, just he's enlightened me a lot with all of that type of stuff.

Erik St. Martin:

I remember, you know, conversations after the book we had written and people coming up and him having conversations with basically, I I've never done well with praise and so I would always be kind of dismissive like, oh no, no. And he's like, you just totally deflated that person. They just wanted to thank you or whatever. So I learned a ton from him, in that regard, but I don't know. There's been so many people who have been involved in the conference over the years too that I've I've learned from, you know, Johnny of course, Aaron Schlesinger, some of these people who have have been involved over the years.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, it's too hard. Like I always feel like I'm going to leave people out.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Leave people out. Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

And we didn't even talk about like a lot of the other people who help out with the conference and stuff too, Caitlin and Angelica and yeah.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Yep, yep. Yeah. And Todd Rafferty and they all, there's this, there are so many people behind the scenes. I mean, I'll tell you like on that note, I mean, honestly, know I'm here, you know, and it's a great honor to sort of be part of this conversation along with Eric, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for Eric and Heather Sullivan because without these folks, there would be no go for con, honestly. That's something I think, I personally don't take that for granted.

Johnny Boursiquot:

And every time we get to have it, you know, I'm thankful for, you know, the risk that Eric, you know, puts himself, exposes himself to financially and personally and the running back and forth that Heather has to do. I mean, you have no idea. When I say you have no idea, you really have no idea how much it takes, how much effort it takes to get this thing sort of to happen every year. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. But from the conference itself standpoint, one of the people that has influenced me very early on was Bill Kennedy.

Johnny Boursiquot:

He's one of the great teachers within Go community. He's spoken almost adversely every Go For Con or taught a workshop at every Go For Con or something. He's involved in the Go community quite a bit. And dare I say, he's kind of took me on under his wing sort of early on. I've been learning from him how to teach and everything else.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Teaching is one of those, one of those sort of things I do because I really love doing it. Know, again, I mentioned earlier that, you know, one of best ways to learn something is actually, you know, learn how to teach at very different skillset to know how to do something versus to know how to teach something. Very, very different skillset. So, but yeah, like it's a passion of mine. I've learned to do that and I've learned a lot of great ways to actually do that and ways not to do that, you know, through Bill Kennedy.

Johnny Boursiquot:

So, you know, shout out to him for sure. But there's so many other people from Mark Bates who actually introduced me to Go for the first time to so many other people that I've been, I've had the pleasure of, you know, encountering throughout the years in the community. And there's just so many people, you know, that basically this podcast had to end. So I can't I can't keep on ruffling writing names, but there's so much that goes into making this an incredible community and incredible experience for I really hope that to to see folks show up in the next one in Seattle.

Jonathan Hall:

Wonderful. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time to chat about GopherCon. I am going to try to make it this year. Well, I guess technically next year.

Jonathan Hall:

This year, 2025 hasn't quite ended yet, but I've not made a go for con yet. But I have an excuse. I haven't lived in The US until just recently.

Erik St. Martin:

I did

Jonathan Hall:

years ago, but

Erik St. Martin:

It's no excuse.

Jonathan Hall:

Okay. So it's no excuse. I have no excuse, but I'm gonna try to come this year if I can make it. And we'd love to

Erik St. Martin:

see it.

Jonathan Hall:

Hope to shake your hands in Seattle.

Johnny Boursiquot:

Likewise.

Jonathan Hall:

Great, guys. Thanks so much for coming on, and we'll see you in Seattle.

Erik St. Martin:

Thanks. See you there.