Topic

Get ready for an electrifying experience at GopherCon with the Hybrid Group’s epic robot-fest session, powered by Go. Dive into drone control via joystick, reunite with our trusty pal GopherBot, and immerse yourself in more IoT wonders than you can handle!

We are bringing a special collection of our favorite programmable robots and toys for you to play with and code, including some retro favorites and a few new friends.

If music is your jam, don’t miss the TinyGo Jam session! Rock out with TinyGo-powered MIDI controllers and enjoy a variety of self-guided musical activities to keep your earbuds delighted.

Topic

You’re an experienced programmer looking to get up and running quickly with Go. You want the knowledge, tools, and techniques to write idiomatic, professional-grade Go using fun exercises that get you comfortable with the language and its ecosystem. This is the workshop you’re looking for.

This immersive and hands-on workshop equips you with the essential knowledge and practical experience to become a proficient Go developer. Throughout this intensive training, you’ll discover the core principles and advanced techniques that make Go a standout language for building robust and high-performance applications.

What a student is expected to learn

• Comprehensive Introduction: Gain a solid understanding of Go’s syntax, data types, control flow, and package management system.
• Go Tools: Get to know the tool chain for building, testing, benchmarking, and profiling your programs.
• Effective Error Handling: Discover Go’s approach to error handling and techniques for creating robust, failure-resistant code.
• Testing: Use the standard library package and other community favorites along with advanced techniques for testing.
• Benchmarking: Take advantage of built-in performance optimization tools.
• Generics: Understand how to leverage parametric polymorphism to remove boilerplate from your code.
• HTTP Servers and Clients: Learn how to write resilient servers and clients along with techniques such as throttling and backoff.
• Concurrency: Learn how to use goroutines, channels, and how thread synchronization works. Leverage techniques such as worker pools, semaphores, and pipelines to take full advantage of Go concurrency.
• Dependency Management: Go beyond the standard library to work with third-party packages securely. You’ll publish your own packages, learn to isolate your CI build from repository outages, and more.
• OpenTelemetry: Build observable Go applications by instrumenting them to emit traces and metrics.

Some of what you’ll work on during the workshop

• Build command line tooling
• Build a REST API with a Database
• Write a Highly-Concurrent Port Scanner
• Write a Load Balancer
• Build a URL Shortener and deploy with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB
• Work with Large Language Models (LLMs) in your projects

Prerequisites

• Complete the Go Tour
• Browse through Go by Example
• Introduce yourself to OpenTelemetry (optional but recommended)
• Introduce yourself to LLMs concepts

Preparation

• Have a GitHub account
• Have an OpenAI account
• Have an AWS account and the awscli configured locally (the services we use will fit comfortably with the free tier AWS provides)
• Install Docker
• Have a functioning Go environment installed with Go 1.22 or later
• Use an editor/IDE with Go plugin installed