Before October, I had never made it to a GDG Zurich event, but the DevFest 2012 they announced sounded too interesting to pass it up. I don’t want to bore you with the minutiae of how it went down, so let me just say it was a great and very well organized weekend. By my rough guess about 100 hackers showed up, which I found quite impressive. After casual introductions and drinks on Friday night we spent Saturday and Sunday in the Zurich youth hostel for talks and hacking. Big thanks to the organizers Vadim, Michel, Corsin and Robert (see here), you did a great job.
I really enjoyed the presentations about AppEngine by Jerome Mouton and about the new Google Drive SDK by Nicolas Garnier. Would love to play with these at some point.
The rest of Saturday was spent chatting and getting to know people, until at some point I mentioned working with Go at Nhumi and people got very interested. Almost everyone had read about it, but no one had used it. There happened to be a free slot left for a codelab on Sunday morning, so I soon found myself with a job to do.
Since I didn’t have much time I just roughly followed the Tour of Go, skipping ahead a little sometimes. This was a good decision as the Go devs have put a lot of thought into its structure. In addition, I made just six slides summarizing some Go essentials from my point of view. This was my “main points about Go” slide:
I gave a code example for each of the latter three points. The audience of about 20 seemed to follow along easily and there were plenty of questions. It was neat to respond to questions and remarks directly by demonstrating things live in the Go Playground.
Thanks everyone for coming, and have fun with Go!