From Couch to Golang

from-couch-to-golang.md

From Couch to Golang

Abstact

Watching programmers switch to Golang is like watching my friends begin running.

Similar to people who start running and fall in love with it, I saw awesome companies switching to Go and loving it and interesting projects being authored in Go and loving it.

Go is minimal, performant, natively concurrent, and has an awesome ecosystem.

This talk is about why you might want to try Golang as well, and how to get up and running!

Details

To dive into more detail about this talk. Here are the two major parts:

1. Why Try Golang? Specifically about the features (or lack of features) that make it so effective and popular. We'll touch on types, performance, concurrency, and a few other language / ecosystem specifics. Examples will be in Golang, Node/JS, and Ruby.

2. How to get started writing Golang. This will be a no-nonsense guide to get a curious individual through the docs, setup with the right resources, and we'll cover a small example of a working Golang API, a simple JSON API blog.

The Pitch

This talk is highly relevant given:

• Demand for Golang is high and growing
• Golang has applications from web programming, to systems programming, to hardware and more.
• Users of Golang absolutely love it! Recommending it at a 19:1 ratio https://blog.golang.org/survey2016-results
• Golang is extremely performant and concurrent out of the box, which makes it a great language for people to consider who are dealing with these issues in their current language.
• Most of my corroborating evidence can be found in the 2016 Golang Developer survey.

Most of my corroborating evidence can be found in the 2016 Golang Developer survey

Overall, I think the proposal is really good, here is what I think could be improved:

• The title: "Couch to Golang" . Is this another way to say "Up & Running with Golang?". When I saw "Couch" I thought of CouchDB, and I didn't see the connection (because indeed the Couch in the title has nothing to do with CouchDB), maybe others have the same thought.
• Too many "awesome"s in the Abstract. I find the adjective is overused and doesn't really mean too much in the context of "ecosystem" or "companies". Do you mean to say rich ecosystem and companies with ambitious goals?
• Is it necessary to have both "Go" and "Golang"? I'd opt for consistency if they have the same exact meaning. Not a biggie, though.
• "This will be a no-nonsense guide to get a curious individual through the docs, setup with the right resources, and we'll cover a small example of a working Golang API, a simple JSON API blog." => I'd split that up to: "This will be a no-nonsense guide to lead a curious individual through the docs and set him up with the right resources. We'll also cover a small example of a working Golang API, a simple JSON API blog."