From Russia with love (Go Time #70) - podcast episode cover

From Russia with love (Go Time #70)

Mar 16, 201853 min
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Episode description

Leo Kalneus joined the show and talked with us about GopherCon Russia and the Go community in Russia. We also debunked a few myths about Siberia and of course talked about interesting Go projects and news.

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Featuring:

Show Notes:

Golang Show (in Russian)

GopherCon Russia

Russian Companies using Go

Golang Slack (in Russian)

Telegram: proGO

Telegram: gogolang

Interesting Go Projects and News

Roundtable with #Golang Stars:: Building Predictability into Your Pipeline

Go 2017 Survey Results

New vgo posts by Russ Cox:

pwned-passwords

Ribs (Russian x-ray records)

GetContact (phone number search)

Words of Heard (Find a date with someone who uses the same password as you)

Gobot

Free Software Friday!

Each week on the show we give a shout out to an open source project or community (or maintainer) that’s made an impact in our day to day developer lives.

Erik - go-git

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Transcript

Transcript for Go Time #70 Erik St. Martin:

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of GoTime. Today's episode is number 70. Today on the show we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Carlisia Pinto...

Carlisia Campos:

Hi, everybody.

Erik St. Martin:

Brian Ketelsen...

Brian Ketelsen:

Hello!

Erik St. Martin:

And he's knitting...

Brian Ketelsen:

Hey...!

Erik St. Martin:

And our special guest for today is one of the organizers of GopherCon Russia, Leo Kalneus.

Leonid Kalneus:

Hello.

Erik St. Martin:

Do you wanna give the listeners maybe just a brief history of you and what you do, and the length of time you've been in the Go community?

Leonid Kalneus:

Okay. I used to be a Go developer two years ago, and after that I started my developer relations work. Now I work at DataArt, as chief community manager. Also, my story about community started three years ago, when I started the first community in Novosibirsk, in far, far away Siberia, probably in the middle of nowhere. I built it from scratch. Do you know Yandex?

Brian Ketelsen:

Yes.

Leonid Kalneus:

The Russian Google, yeah. So our first meeting was in their office, and we had about 100 people there.

Brian Ketelsen:

Nice, that's really big. How big is Novosibirsk in terms of people?

Leonid Kalneus:

It's more than 1,5 million people there.

Brian Ketelsen:

Wow...!

Leonid Kalneus:

It's the third city in terms of population in Russia.

Brian Ketelsen:

Okay.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. After that I started to work on different technical communities in Novosibirsk, so now I lead the Google developer group there, and we have several series of technical meetups - we have meetups about Golang, we have meetups about Android, we have meetups about DevOps, and so on. Also, we have one big conference there called [DevFest Siberia](https://gdg-siberia.com/). We started to organize this conference probably two years ago. We even had [Dave Cheney](https://twitter.com/davecheney) last year... In Siberia, can you imagine that? \[laughter\]

Carlisia Campos:

I can't imagine anybody in Siberia... It's so far and so cold.

Brian Ketelsen:

Can you tell us a little bit about Siberia? Because in America the only thing that most people know about Siberia is that it's where people get sent for punishment, and I don't think that's accurate. Can you tell us what Siberia is really like? Is it really always cold?

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah, exactly. I need to know that.

Leonid Kalneus:

No, it's not always cold. In the summer we have temperatures like 30 Celsius degrees.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's hot.

Leonid Kalneus:

Right now it's about -12, I think.

Brian Ketelsen:

And that's cold.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's very cold.

Leonid Kalneus:

But you know, right now I'm in St. Petersburg - I moved from Novosibirsk last year - and today in St. Petersburg it's -20 Celsius degrees.

Brian Ketelsen:

\[04:12\] Wow. Now, St. Petersburg is on the Western side of Russia, right?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, right.

Brian Ketelsen:

Okay.

Carlisia Campos:

I just wanted to clarify, -20 Celsius is -4 Fahrenheit, and 30 degrees Celsius is 86 degrees Fahrenheit... So that's not bad. But is it like for a day, or is like for the whole summer?

Leonid Kalneus:

It's for the day.

Carlisia Campos:

One day of the summer is hot, and the other days are cold?

Leonid Kalneus:

Oh, no, no, no. In Novosibirsk it's quite usual weather in the summer.

Carlisia Campos:

Okay. \[laughs\] Just to clarify.

Brian Ketelsen:

That sounds like a nice, normal climate.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah.

Brian Ketelsen:

Good.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. Also, in Novosibirsk we have a lot of research institutes - more than 30, I think - and all of them are located in a special place called [Akademgorodok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademgorodok). It's a very scientific place.

Brian Ketelsen:

It sounds very awesome, it sounds like a technical center of awesomeness.

Carlisia Campos:

Well, I can't imagine anything that you said to be truthful... Starting with you got 100 people to show up at your first meetup - it's amazing!

Erik St. Martin:

That's wild. Most meetups never get that big.

Brian Ketelsen:

That is good!

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah, so now I'm triply glad that you're here, because you're going to -- I'm just looking forward to knowing more about Siberia, and the community there... It sounds really exciting.

Erik St. Martin:

Is there generally quite a few Go developers in that area? Is Go a really popular language for a lot of companies there?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yes, right now we have a lot of companies that use Go in production, but three years ago there were few companies there. Maybe one, or two. It was very hard to track all these people. Most of them were just interested in the topic; we probably had only ten Go developers there in the audience.

Brian Ketelsen:

Wow. So you did a great job.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious - when people decide they want to learn Go in your community... Tell me again, when was this first meetup you had? Do people go to meetups, do they get together? Do they have workshops? What are the resources available to them? Because here in the U.S. - and even in Europe - there are conferences, there's the Slack accounts... Are people on Slack? Do you have your own Russian Slack communication? How do you connect to each other?

Leonid Kalneus:

We have Russian-speaking GopherSlack, with more than 2,000 people, I think.

Carlisia Campos:

Oh, that's cool.

Leonid Kalneus:

Also, we have our own Russian-speaking podcast called [Golang Show](http://golangshow.com/)... And we will be happy to record an episode with Brian, in Moscow.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yay!

Leonid Kalneus:

Quite soon.

Brian Ketelsen:

Very soon.

Leonid Kalneus:

I'll be prepared.

Brian Ketelsen:

And that's gonna be big, because I'm going to announce a huge secret in my talk in Moscow. Huge.

Carlisia Campos:

What is the secret?

Brian Ketelsen:

Well, it's a secret, I can't tell you. Nice try, though.

Carlisia Campos:

Thank you.

Brian Ketelsen:

But it's huge.

Erik St. Martin:

It's just the two of us right here... \[laughter\] Nobody will ever know.

Leonid Kalneus:

\[07:59\] Yeah, also we have -- do you know Telegram?

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yes.

Leonid Kalneus:

We also have two chats there.

Carlisia Campos:

That's a phone app, for people who don't know.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, it's like WhatsApp, but much better. \[laughter\]

Brian Ketelsen:

Old people like me -- I don't know what that is. I'm still trying to figure out Snapstagram. \[laughter\] That's what I call it, just to make my daughter mad. "Are you playing on Snapstagram again?" "Shut up, dad..." \[laughter\]

Leonid Kalneus:

By the way, we tried to organize [GopherCon Russia](https://www.gophercon-russia.ru/) last year, but we weren't good enough, so it's our second try.

Brian Ketelsen:

Well, it's gonna be awesome this year.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, I think so, because we have right now more than 400 sign-ups for the conference.

Brian Ketelsen:

Wow...

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, and we have 20 amazing speakers.

Brian Ketelsen:

I was looking at the speaker list yesterday, and you have really good speakers lined up.

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, there's a number of great speakers there.

Brian Ketelsen:

And half of Microsoft. \[laughter\]

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

The question is though, how many of them were on there before they were at Microsoft? Because most of us have gravitated there only in the recent months.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's true.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, that's true. By the way, we invited Ashley to our Siberian conference last year... \[laughs\] But we had some problems with business tickets to Russia, because the cost was too high.

Brian Ketelsen:

It is very expensive. I just bought my plane tickets, and I could buy a car for how much I spent on my plane tickets.

Leonid Kalneus:

Well, that's... Wow.

Brian Ketelsen:

It's a good thing I didn't pay for them. I took it out of Erik's budget.

Erik St. Martin:

\[laughs\] Are you trying to say I don't travel enough?

Brian Ketelsen:

No, I'm trying to say that you're not getting a raise this year because I'm going to Russia. \[laughter\]

Erik St. Martin:

You better make sure he has a good trip!

Brian Ketelsen:

So this is gonna be the first GopherCon Russia... Tell us about the venue. What kind of building is it gonna be held in? It's in Moscow, right?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yes, obviously it's in Moscow.

Brian Ketelsen:

Is it going to be in the Kremlin?

Leonid Kalneus:

Not for sure... \[laughs\]

Brian Ketelsen:

No?

Leonid Kalneus:

No... Gophers are not allowed there.

Brian Ketelsen:

No gophers allowed in the Kremlin... I'm going to try to find out if it's okay for gophers to go to the Kremlin and go inside. Because it's what I do. I have to break rules. So if I don't make it home, you guys understand why. I'm in jail, in Siberia.

Leonid Kalneus:

\[laughs\] By the way, if you will have enough time, we can go to St. Petersburg, before or after the conference.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, nice.

Leonid Kalneus:

We can organize a local meetup if you want. So the venue will be in Moscow, it's called [Technopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopolis_Moscow). It's quite a big, huge, comfortable conference hall. Nothing very special, but it's quite a nice place. I guess I was there for one conference before, and I like it.

Brian Ketelsen:

Any place is special if it's full of gophers. That makes it special.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, definitely. And we will have a lot of gophers there.

Brian Ketelsen:

I am so excited. So you said 400 people are coming this time? You sold 400 tickets?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, even more than 400.

Brian Ketelsen:

\[12:01\] Oh, that's good. That's great for a first conference. Well done!

Carlisia Campos:

That is excellent, yeah.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. And if you want, I can tell you some numbers about Moscow gophers community.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yes, sure.

Carlisia Campos:

Absolutely, yeah.

Leonid Kalneus:

Let me check my notes. Oh, by the way, we also have a mailing list for the Russian-speaking community since 2010. The first Moscow meetup was five years ago, and they had 27 people there.

Brian Ketelsen:

Wow.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah, impressive.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yup, so that's the history of Russia Gophers community. Also, we have quite a big community in St. Petersburg, about 700 gophers there. I'm not sure the community is very active, but still, we have it.

Brian Ketelsen:

But they will be active now that you're there.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah.

Carlisia Campos:

Before I forget - it doesn't have to be right now, but I wanna make sure that you give us the link to at least some of the meetups you know, and link to how people can get an invite to your Gopher Slack account... Also, another thing that I wanted to ask - is there any general Twitter account that people can follow, or Facebook groups, and information for how to get on Telegram? So we can have it for posterity on the show notes, okay?

Leonid Kalneus:

Okay, sure. I will send it.

Carlisia Campos:

And another thing that I wanted to ask, along those lines - is there any dedicated place for people to look for Go jobs in Russia, or in your area?

Brian Ketelsen:

Good question.

Leonid Kalneus:

Well, we have a special website called Headhunter in Russia, and you can find any jobs there. It's the first source, I guess, and the special places are our Gopher Slack, we have a special channel there for job offers... And we have also a channel in Telegram for that.

Carlisia Campos:

Cool.

Brian Ketelsen:

Very nice. So it sounds like the Go community in Russia is incredibly well organized; probably better organized than the one here. That's good news.

Leonid Kalneus:

I really enjoyed the gophers community in San Francisco. I went to some meetups there.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, it is a good community there, that's true.

Leonid Kalneus:

Also, I'm going to the Google I/O this year in May, so we can meet there, too.

Brian Ketelsen:

Are you gonna come to Microsoft Build, too?

Leonid Kalneus:

If you can invite me, for sure.

Brian Ketelsen:

Well, I'll work on that then. Very good. I think that's also in May. Maybe you could just make it a big, long trip.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yup, why not. Because I can work totally remotely, so...

Brian Ketelsen:

Perfect. Working remotely is the best kind of working.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, definitely.

Brian Ketelsen:

So what sort of big companies outside of [Yandex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex) use Go in Russia?

Leonid Kalneus:

For sure, one of the biggest is [MailRu Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail.Ru). Do you know the social network [VKontakte (VK)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VKontakte)? It's like the Russia Facebook. They use Go in some of their backend services. And actually, there are a lot of smaller companies that use Go in their production also. I can mention [Avito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avito.ru). It's like a Russian eBay, but a bit smaller than eBay, for sure. They also use Go in their backend services. That's the most well-known, I think. And not Russian, but Russian-speaking - the guys from Gett, from Minsk... Do you know a company called [Juno](https://gett.com/juno/)? It's like Gett in New York -- it's not like, it's Gett in New York. So yeah, they have a lot of stuff in Go.

Brian Ketelsen:

\[16:36\] Nice.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, they're very nice folks.

Carlisia Campos:

I just went to the Golang wiki page, and there is a page called [Go users](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUsers) that lists companies from around the world, and it's divided up by continent and then countries, and there are only two companies under Russia, so that definitely needs to be updated. What's there right now is ITooLabs and PostmanQ.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. By the way, ITooLabs - we have a speaker from there. Yeah, I think we should update this list.

Brian Ketelsen:

Nice. So are there any talks that you're particularly excited about for GopherCon Russia? Any talks that look amazing? I know you can't pick any favorites, but there's gotta be something that you're excited to watch.

Leonid Kalneus:

Personally, I'm very excited to meet [Dmitry Vyukov](https://twitter.com/dvyukov) in person, and to listen to his talk.

Brian Ketelsen:

He's my hero.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, same to me.

Brian Ketelsen:

I have a really good Dmitry Vyukov story. Erik, I don't know if you were there, you may remember this. At GopherCon 2015 or 2014 - it was several years ago - Dmitry was a speaker, but I hadn't met him yet because he was gonna speak on the second day, and it was the first day... So we were walking home from the pre-party, or walking home from the place where we were having beer the first night, and I had been talking to Dmitry by email forever, on Twitter, and I just told him what a big fan I was and how excited I was to meet him... So I'm walking home, and this really tall person walks up next to me and says "Hi." I had no idea who it was, so I said "Hi", and he kept trying to bring up conversation points, but I was tired and I had two beers, and I was not talking well. Then somebody else walked up and said "Oh, hi Dmitry!" It was Dmitry Vyukov, and I felt like an a--hole. So there's my Dmitry Vyukov story. Sorry, Dmitry. I was his biggest fan, and I didn't even recognize him.

Erik St. Martin:

Knowing people from the internet is hard, though. Most of us have avatars that are not us, and even in person people look different than their avatar... I think that's an honest mistake.

Brian Ketelsen:

It was. I still felt bad... I mean, this is the guy that made Go twice as fast in Go 1.4, or 1.5, or whatever it was... And then added all of that awesome race detection, and the profiler... He's a serious hero in the Go community. When I meet him in March again, I won't make that mistake.

Carlisia Campos:

So what would you like to have in your community? What sort of support, or access, or resource would you like to have in your Go community that you don't have right now?

Leonid Kalneus:

Wow, so... If you are speaking about far, far away Siberia, I will be happier if more speakers will come to visit us and talk to our gophers in person. Maybe this is the most important point for us.

Carlisia Campos:

\[20:14\] Do you mean at your meetup?

Leonid Kalneus:

For example, we can use DevFest Siberia as a place to meet. Yeah, because it's quite huge land, we have more than 700 people there... So it's quite reasonable to come to Siberia to talk to this audience.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah.

Brian Ketelsen:

Does DevFest happen in the same time every year?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yes, I think it's always in autumn. This year it will be at the end of November, and last year it was in September... So quite close to the same dates.

Brian Ketelsen:

Leo, I can't understand why you would have a hard time convincing anybody to come to Siberia in November. \[laughter\]

Leonid Kalneus:

Because now it's a true Siberian experience.

Brian Ketelsen:

\[laughs\] Snowshoes, and dog sleds...

Leonid Kalneus:

\[laughs\] We had a guy from Brazil, it was his first time he saw snow. He was so happy... And our first time, the weather was -40 Celsius degrees, so a really true Siberian experience.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, gosh...

Leonid Kalneus:

And we have speakers from 12 different countries.

Carlisia Campos:

It truly must be an experience... Even for people who have seen snow, it must be so different. I can't even imagine. I would love to go.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, we can talk about that later.

Brian Ketelsen:

Let's go, Carlisia. You and me - we're going to DevFest in November, in Siberia. Let's do it.

Carlisia Campos:

Let's do it, Brian. Let's plan. Oh my gosh, I need to --

Brian Ketelsen:

I need to knit more hats.

Leonid Kalneus:

We can plan everything in May.

Brian Ketelsen:

Okay, it's a plan. So what has been the hardest part about organizing a conference for you? What's been really difficult?

Leonid Kalneus:

To keep everything in mind, probably, the past dates, because... Yeah, usually something goes wrong at the end, you know?

Brian Ketelsen:

Always something goes wrong.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, right. But I really enjoy to work on community-driven events, because they're quite different from commercial-based conferences. When I relocated to St. Petersburg I found that there are a lot of cool conferences in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, but they are pretty expensive for the developers. They cost like maybe $500 for a ticket. It's quite a high price... Even a one-day conference. I'm very proud that we have GopherCon Russia as a community-driven event.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's excellent. It's the community that makes Go amazing... Everywhere around the world, it's the community.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah.

Carlisia Campos:

Absolutely.

Leonid Kalneus:

By the way, I think Go communities are the most friendly communities I've ever seen.

Brian Ketelsen:

I agree.

Carlisia Campos:

I hear that all the time.

Brian Ketelsen:

So how many organizers are there for GopherCon Russia? There's you, and a few others, right?

Leonid Kalneus:

\[24:05\] Yeah, it's me, Alex - Alex is the organizer of the Moscow Gophers community. And we have Elena - she's responsible for organizing stuff, and me and Alex, we're more about the speakers, the program and so on.

Brian Ketelsen:

So do you wanna say hi to them on the air?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, I hope they're listening to me, so... Hi, guys!

Brian Ketelsen:

Of course they're listening. They're shouting and screaming and rooting for you right now.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, I think so.

Brian Ketelsen:

But Leo told us before the show that he was doing all the work, and that they weren't doing any... \[laughter\] So I hope he doesn't get in any trouble. I'm just teasing...

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. By the way, we have one cool speaker I would like to highlight... It's [Elena Grahovac](https://twitter.com/webdeva). She's originally from Siberia, from Novosibirsk, and she also did great work for our community. She was leading a workshop for several months, about Go programming languages, there, on behalf of WTM group. It was very cool.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's awesome. That name sounds really familiar, too.

Carlisia Campos:

Well, we talked about having her on the show.

Brian Ketelsen:

Okay, that's why.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, she's very active. Now she lives in Berlin, in Germany.

Carlisia Campos:

What do you think, Leo, should we have her on the show?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, definitely.

Carlisia Campos:

Definitely, right? I agree.

Brian Ketelsen:

So what kind of projects in Go are you most excited about, Leo?

Leonid Kalneus:

Well, personally I'm really excited about [Gobot](https://gobot.io/) and [GoCD](https://www.gocd.org/) stuff.

Brian Ketelsen:

Nice...

Leonid Kalneus:

But you know, right now I don't write a lot in Go. I do some automation in Go or in Python from time to time... That's probably why I'm so excited about these projects, because I'm trying to do some projects with it, with some hardware I have at home. It's more a hobby.

Brian Ketelsen:

I think that's a universal thing. Everybody who does Go in any way has tried Gobot in some way or another. It's one of the most fun projects out there. We love [Ron](https://twitter.com/deadprogram) so much.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah. It's quite nice, quite handy stuff.

Carlisia Campos:

That's not true, I have not played with Gobot.

Leonid Kalneus:

You should try it.

Brian Ketelsen:

Okay, not everybody... But if you come to Hack Day at GopherCon you could play with Gobot, because Ron runs an all-day long workshop where he gives away free toys that you can program with Gobot.

Leonid Kalneus:

True.

Erik St. Martin:

So before we jump over to the projects and news part of the show, I just wanna recap about GopherCon Russia - so it's one day, it's in March... What's the date?

Leonid Kalneus:

It's on the 17th of March.

Brian Ketelsen:

St. Patrick's day.

Erik St. Martin:

And for anybody who might want to attend who does not already have a ticket, are tickets still available, or are you sold out?

Leonid Kalneus:

It's still available, yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

And the site for that, for anybody who's interested, is [GopherCon-Russia](https://www.gophercon-russia.ru/)...?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yup.

Erik St. Martin:

\[27:57\] Dot ru (.ru). I know we mentioned one or two speakers, but did you wanna give a quick highlight of a few more speakers? Maybe a couple of the keynoters, or things like that.

Leonid Kalneus:

Well, I don't want to highlight someone else. I think everyone is quite a brilliant speaker there, at the least. Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

I think that's definitely understandable. It's always hard to -- you don't wanna leave anybody out.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, right.

Brian Ketelsen:

I would list the names of all the speakers, but I'm not sure I can pronounce them. I do know that there's a lot of people I know on this list though, which is really awesome. It's gonna be a fun conference.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yup.

Erik St. Martin:

Brian needs to bring GoTime stickers.

Brian Ketelsen:

I don't have -- Adam needs to FedEx me some GoTime stickers, because I don't have any and I leave Saturday.

Erik St. Martin:

Something tells me you're not gonna get them on time.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, wait, I leave Saturday for Washington DC. I've still got time. I'll ping Adam. I get confused about where I'm traveling. I don't even know what day it is.

Leonid Kalneus:

Probably I will bring some Siberian stickers for you, from our Go community.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, nice. That would be excellent. I have a huge bag of stickers; everywhere I go, I collect more so that we can do sticker trading. That's a wonderful idea... And I'll bring my big bag, so that everybody can get stickers from places that they've never seen.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yes, stickers' black market.

Brian Ketelsen:

Black market stickers. That reminds me of an article I read, which is completely unrelated to Go, about black market records in Russia, in the '60s or '70s - maybe it was the '50s - where they used old X-ray pictures to make records, phonographs of music.

Erik St. Martin:

Interesting. So they melted it down, and...?

Brian Ketelsen:

No, they didn't even melt them down, they just pressed the records directly into old X-rays. So there's collections of these records where it's like somebody's broken foot, and it's Elvis. It's so cool. I'll have to dig up a link to it, but it was -- because that music was not legal, so it was an underground scene where they just found these old X-rays and they used the old X-rays to make record pressings.

Erik St. Martin:

People are creative. I wish I had that creativity to think of that... Like, "Here, I'm just gonna use X-rays."

Brian Ketelsen:

Why not? Kind of awesome.

Erik St. Martin:

Okay, so does everybody want to move into projects and news?

Brian Ketelsen:

Yes!

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, let's go.

Erik St. Martin:

Alright. I'll mention one thing quickly before moving on to the ones that can take much longer. Last week's episode we talked about Vgo, and there's been I think two more posts in that series; we talked about them coming out - they are out, so if you haven't read the additional posts in that series by Russ Cox, we'll link to them in the show notes. The second item to talk about - it was 2-3 days ago, the results for the [2017 Go survey](https://blog.golang.org/survey2017-results) came out, which was really interesting.

Brian Ketelsen:

What was interesting about it? I haven't read it yet.

Erik St. Martin:

The link is in the show notes, but it was actually -- there's been a huge shift in the number of people who basically say they program Go outside of work or they do it at work. They basically swapped. 2016 I think 66% of people or something like that - the top answer was "I program Go outside of work", and now at work seems to be the thing. \[32:05\] Some of the other stuff I found interesting was actually the rankings based on language expertise and preferences. I expected to see -- obviously, Go was the top one in the list, but I expected to see a lot more like Python and Ruby and JavaScript... I didn't expect to see Java and C and C++ up there. This is in order of preference, but these languages have been around longer, so I think it's somewhat of an indicator of the communities that people are coming from when adopting Go... I mean, that'd be my assumption; if I had to answer my preference list, it would probably be Go first, and then the language I came from.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah, that's a good assumption, I think.

Erik St. Martin:

Some of the other things that were interesting was - I need to find it on the list, but it was asked how long people have been doing Go for, and that seems to be getting much bigger. Last year I think CLI programs were the top thing that people used Go to write, and now it seems to be API and RPC services. I need to find it on here, but another thing that surprised me was there is an answer "Web services that return HTML." That actually ranks higher than agents and daemons, libraries and frameworks, data processing pipelines... I didn't expect there to be as much there for web, because a lot of people are already using things like Node and Django and Rails and things like that, so I was actually surprised to see that.

Brian Ketelsen:

I'm confused... Is that web servers that return HTML? Is that like just web apps?

Erik St. Martin:

Yeah, so the answer itself said web services, and in parentheses it said "returning HTML", so I would probably think of that as something that actually serves the HTML, and not like a back-end service that delivers JSON to a front-end. That's actually really cool, because I didn't expect that to be -- I know people are doing it, but I didn't expect it to rank as high as it did over some of the other things.

Brian Ketelsen:

That is interesting.

Erik St. Martin:

And 50% or 48% of respondents said that they used Go as part of their daily routine...

Brian Ketelsen:

I brush my teeth with Go every day, that makes sense... \[laughter\]

Erik St. Martin:

We need gopher toothbrushes.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, wow... That's our new swag for next year, Go toothbrushes... Because gophers should have good hygiene.

Erik St. Martin:

I wonder whether people would take that personally, like "What are you trying to say? Are you saying that we're not well-groomed, or something...? Like, toothbrushes...?" Some other interesting statistics out of that were operating system of choice that people use for development. 64% said Linux, 49% Mac, and 18% Windows. For some reason, I actually anticipated Mac being over Linux. I know a lot of us are Linux lovers for obviously writing our services against, but I still see mostly Macs, and things like that, for people using it.

Brian Ketelsen:

I don't know if I believe that, unless they're talking about Vagrant or virtual machines, because every conference I go to, it's a sea of MacBook Pros, there's no Linux machines out there. I think there's something wrong with that.

Erik St. Martin:

Maybe the Linux people don't like going to conferences.

Brian Ketelsen:

Fair... Or maybe they bring their Macs because they're afraid of not fitting in...

Erik St. Martin:

\[36:08\] No, actually -- I mean, if you think about it, I fall into that category really well, right? I develop exclusively on Linux - I have my Linux workstation, I have a Linux laptop I write code on... But I do all my adminy stuff - social media, video chats and email and all that stuff, my to-do lists and stuff are all on my Mac, so when I travel, I bring my Mac.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's true, good point.

Erik St. Martin:

So the other interesting stat too was there was a swap - last year's survey showed Vim as being the top editor as far as preference goes, and it swapped with VS Code this year.

Brian Ketelsen:

Wow, VS Code is in first place?

Erik St. Martin:

VS Code is in first place.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's amazing. VS Code is really an awesome place to do Go development. But so is Vim Go.

Carlisia Campos:

I think as more people enter the community and they have different habits, we're going to see differences in what tools people use... So that makes total sense to me.

Erik St. Martin:

And as far as community stuff goes, one thing that was actually really surprising to me was that 40% of respondents said that they've never attended a Go remote meetup or Go conference or training, or Go Bridge event or anything in that manner. That was actually the top answer, 40% of people haven't done that. I'd be really curious to know why that is. Is it not having the opportunity to do so, or they feel they can learn enough through video content and blog posts and things like that? Or whether those things don't feel welcoming enough... I'd be interested -- because I wouldn't have expected that to be the top answer.

Carlisia Campos:

It's really hard to tell. We can speculate... That number would be more relevant if it was accompanied by geographical location...

Brian Ketelsen:

True.

Carlisia Campos:

Because it makes such a big difference. If someone in San Francisco said "Oh, I'm doing Go but I haven't attended anything", then we should be like "Oh, we need to do better, because the resources are there... People don't know, or what's going on?" But if someone in some really remote part of the U.S. or part of the world is saying "I haven't gone", then it's good, because they are doing Go in spite of not having access to these things.

Brian Ketelsen:

Right.

Erik St. Martin:

Oh, yeah.

Carlisia Campos:

It's completely different, depending on where people are.

Erik St. Martin:

I think that's actually a really good point, because even thinking about here locally in Tampa - we've been doing pretty bad about consistently holding meetups... Because it gets hard to find people to present or to have the time to create presentations, and sometimes just the overhead of trying to find a location for it and things like that, if you don't already have a company you can consistently do it at... So even here locally, right? Anybody who lives here and we're not running meetups here, or one didn't exist, and if you don't work for a company who's willing to send you to events and you don't have meetups locally, you don't have the ability to go. So maybe that's also an indicator of the spread - we're starting to spread out of the big tech hubs and into the rest of the world.

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah. That also makes me wanna ask Leo - Leo, did you take this survey, did you know about it?

Leonid Kalneus:

Yes, and yes.

Carlisia Campos:

\[40:06\] Do you think a lot of people in your community knew about it and took it, too?

Leonid Kalneus:

I'm not sure, actually, because I can't track that, but I think I spread this link to the community.

Carlisia Campos:

That's good.

Leonid Kalneus:

I'm not sure about the Moscow community, but I shared the link to the Siberia community definitely.

Carlisia Campos:

So Russian is showing up as 3% of the respondents.

Leonid Kalneus:

Well... Maybe.

Carlisia Campos:

That's good. Just as a comparison - Brazil, which is also a big country, is showing up as 2%. India is showing up as 2%, and India has been having a Go conference for a while now.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yeah, that's very good.

Erik St. Martin:

Where does China rank?

Carlisia Campos:

It's 2%.

Erik St. Martin:

Interesting.

Brian Ketelsen:

You know, a lot of this could be a language barrier, too.

Erik St. Martin:

Oh yeah, I mean, we don't share the same mediums for getting news and being made aware of these things, and all of that... So it's always really hard to actually use it as final statistics and anything less than kind of a gauge. I mean, even when we do a survey for GopherCon -- I forget what the percentage of people is, but it's certainly less than 50% of people ever fill out the survey.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's true. Leo, I forgot a very important question that I need to ask you - Vim or Emacs?

Carlisia Campos:

Oh, geez...

Leonid Kalneus:

Sorry?

Brian Ketelsen:

Do you use Vim or Emacs?

Leonid Kalneus:

I use Vim.

Erik St. Martin:

Tabs or spaces -- no... \[laughter\]

Brian Ketelsen:

Very good, Leo. It's all good, he uses Vim.

Carlisia Campos:

One thing that I wanted to mention too from the survey -- I don't know if Erik was going to get to it; if so, sorry Erik, I'm cutting ahead of you... In the community aspect, the answer to "I feel welcome in the Go community" last year the disagreement was 15 to 1 -- sorry, the agreement to disagreement... Yeah, that wasn't gonna sound right. The agreement to disagreement last year was 15 to 1, and this year the agreement increased to 25 to 1. I think that's pretty cool.

Brian Ketelsen:

That is very good.

Erik St. Martin:

Oh, that's awesome. We're making people feel more welcome. So I think the last thing that I can think of offhand -- this is a really long thing, and it's an interesting read for anybody who actually wants to get into all the details outside of the ones I've pointed out now... The two primary things that were kind of conveyed in problems people see with Go or why they're not using it were lack of generics and dependency management. That actually talks about they're gonna try to focus on those two issues in 2018.

Brian Ketelsen:

Nice. I don't want generics...

Erik St. Martin:

I can't think of anything else in there offhand that I thought was interesting...

Brian Ketelsen:

100% of the people surveyed said that GoTime was their favorite podcast. \[laughter\]

Carlisia Campos:

Well, the English speakers, right?

Brian Ketelsen:

No, 100%. All of them said GoTime was their favorite podcast. Even if they came from another place where they had a different podcast, they said GoTime was better. \[laughter\]

Erik St. Martin:

\[44:00\] Brian has this Chrome filter called "Craze Brian", and when he turns it on, everything turns into 100% love. \[laughter\] It's like, every site he goes to, "100% of the people who use this site love Brian." \[laughter\]

Brian Ketelsen:

That'd be an interesting Chrome filter. I'm gonna work on that, for Donald Trump.

Erik St. Martin:

It would make you feel good every day, right?

Brian Ketelsen:

True.

Erik St. Martin:

Everywhere you go, the site somewhere in there compliments you. You install it and you just give it your name, and done. Sell it for a dollar, be a millionaire.

Brian Ketelsen:

Brilliant.

Erik St. Martin:

I get my commission, because it's my idea though.

Brian Ketelsen:

Sure, you can have a penny out of every dollar.

Erik St. Martin:

I'll take it. Alright, so next on interesting projects and news - I haven't been trolling GitHub too much the past week or so, but... I can't remember, I think we mentioned the [Pwned Passwords list and service](https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords), but Matt Evans has created a [Go library for querying the pwned passwords list](https://github.com/mattevans/pwned-passwords) to see if a password has been compromised in a prior data leak.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's excellent... Which reminds me of the dating app that lets you enter your password to find other people that have the same password for dating... Which makes so much sense! \[laughter\]

Erik St. Martin:

Think about the number of people who still use "password1234" though... You'd end up with a ton of matches.

Brian Ketelsen:

Well, that's why they're perfect for each other; if you're using "password123", then you guys were meant to be.

Carlisia Campos:

Just grab the first one, you cannot go wrong. First one on the list that pops up, that's it.

Brian Ketelsen:

Sold. "She's my soulmate...!"

Erik St. Martin:

But then people like me, who use my generated one passwords - there'd be nobody. Just loneliness.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yeah...

Erik St. Martin:

Alright, did anybody have any other projects or news that they came across this week?

Carlisia Campos:

Sorry, I have a slow come-back to that, but I have to say it... You can't be locked in security AND love, it can only be one. So if you don't find a match, that's a good thing, based on the password... \[laughter\] At least you're good with security, so... Who cares about love?

Erik St. Martin:

We commend you on your selection of secure passwords. We're sorry, you're gonna be lonely", right?

Carlisia Campos:

Yes. \[laughs\] Alright, moving on.

Erik St. Martin:

That is such a weird way to find a date. "Please give me all the people who share the passwords with me."

Carlisia Campos:

That's not real, right?

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, I think it's real.

Erik St. Martin:

It also seems like a really, really bad security idea. Like, "Oh, this match shares the same password as you." Now you go find all the sites and you have somebody's name and knowing that they have that password.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's perfect. Maybe it's just a great, big fishing experiment.

Erik St. Martin:

That's quite possible, too.

Brian Ketelsen:

I don't know.

Leonid Kalneus:

Have you heard about the Get Contact application?

Brian Ketelsen:

No.

Leonid Kalneus:

It's an application - you sign up and it collects all your contacts from the address book, and you can search for any phone numbers and find the name of the person. The fun story here is, for example, you can find out how other people wrote down in their address book; it's very fun. I can send you the name...

Brian Ketelsen:

\[48:00\] Oh... That's scary.

Leonid Kalneus:

It's very bad for the privacy, but a very funny application.

Brian Ketelsen:

Yeah, because I have interesting names for people in my address book that I would not want anybody to ever know.

Carlisia Campos:

Oh, really?

Brian Ketelsen:

Yeah, like Erik... I don't call him Erik in my address book; it's something completely different, and if Erik knew that, he would be mad at me for a long time. Those are things that we don't want public.

Leonid Kalneus:

\[laughs\] Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

Alright. So \#FreeSoftwareFriday... Does anybody have stuff?

Brian Ketelsen:

You know, I don't. I don't have a \#FreeSoftwareFriday this week; how sad is that?

Carlisia Campos:

Oh, if Brian doesn't, I feel not so bad for not having one either, just mainly because I didn't think about it. I haven't been having one. It's hard.

Erik St. Martin:

Sometimes it's hard based on what you're doing, and if you're kind of doing the same thing for weeks on end, you may not be exposed to projects... Or when you are, you don't think to write that down, like "I need to give this person a shout-out."

Carlisia Campos:

Yeah.

Erik St. Martin:

Leo, so at the end of every episode what we typically do is something we call \#FreeSoftwareFriday, where we give a shout-out to a project or a maintainer of open source - it does not have to be Go - just to kind of show our love and appreciation for what they do. I know this is on the spot, so it is okay if you don't have one, but if there's anybody or any project that you absolutely love and helps you out, feel free to give them a shout-out.

Leonid Kalneus:

Well, maybe not today... Sorry, guys.

Erik St. Martin:

Okay. So I do have one this week - source{d}, they have a [go-git](https://github.com/src-d/go-git) library, which is an implementation of Git completely in Go, and for a project that we are working on at work I'm doing some Git stuff, and I've been playing along with that as a library, rather than shelling out to the Git command itself. It's making things a lot cleaner and more fun.

Brian Ketelsen:

That's really nice.

Carlisia Campos:

That's interesting.

Brian Ketelsen:

[Source{d}](https://sourced.tech/), that's where [Francesc Campoy](https://twitter.com/francesc) went, right?

Erik St. Martin:

Yes.

Brian Ketelsen:

Awesome. Hi, Francesc. We love you.

Leonid Kalneus:

Yeah, they also have a speaker from there, at GopherCon Russia.

Erik St. Martin:

Oh, yeah?

Carlisia Campos:

Not Francesc?

Leonid Kalneus:

No, unfortunately. But yeah, we have Vadim - he is a Google developer expert on machine learning. Yeah, quite a cool guy. I will send his GitHub to the Slack.

Brian Ketelsen:

\[50:54\] That's awesome, thank you.

Erik St. Martin:

Alright, so if nobody has any other projects to give a shout-out to, I think we are at time. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Leo. Thank you to all of our listeners, thank you Carlisia for being on the show... Brian, we're no longer friends.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, come on... \[laughter\] You know I'm just teasing, Erik. And I'll get rid of the nasty name in my phonebook.

Erik St. Martin:

I wanna know what the ringtone is, too.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, no, you don't. You really don't. I just posted a picture in Slack of the hat that I knitted during today's show for my new niece, Eva. Shout-out to Eva, who is tiny, tiny, tiny, and I'm looking forward to meeting her this weekend. I have to bring a hat.

Erik St. Martin:

It's adorable. You need to post in on Twitter in reply to my commenting that you're knitting live, so people can see the result.

Brian Ketelsen:

Oh, good point. Okay, I'll go do that right now.

Erik St. Martin:

Alright, so thanks again for listening, everybody. You can follow us on Twitter, @GoTimeFM. Head to gotime.fm to subscribe, and github.com/gotimefm/ping if you have suggestions for topics or speakers, including yourself. With that, goodbye everybody! We'll see you next week.

Brian Ketelsen:

Goodbye! Thanks, Leo.

Leonid Kalneus:

Thanks for having me.

Carlisia Campos:

Bye, everybody. Leo, this was great! Thank you.

Leonid Kalneus:

Bye all.

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