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The course is lead by Carlos Souza and has five levels. Level one is completely free; all you have to do is head over to CodeSchool.com/Go, click on the giant Start Course For Free button and create a free account to get started. Level one has two videos and eight challenges, and the cool thing is that all of the codin... |
After you've made it through the first level, they have four more levels that have around 30-35 challenges that will work your way through variables and type inference. You can learn about all the data types and error handling, collections, and by the time you make it down into the level four and five, you get into som... |
Make sure you head over to CodeSchool.com/Go, try out the first level. Thanks again to Code School for this awesome course and for sponsoring the show. |
So just before the break, Cory was asking you, JBD, what areas you think can be improved to optimize for newcomers? |
**Jaana Dogan:** I do not believe that we have an easy onboarding experience. When I started using this programming language, I learned so many things through code reviews and asking people... One of the obvious examples is we still don't have Canonical tutorials for the tooling, and it just took me experience to get t... |
I think initially the community was more of exchanging ideas and knowledge; there was a lower barrier to contribute to one of the contributor's codebase, and get your Go code reviewed, and information was so much easier to access. I don't believe that it's true anymore. What do you feel about that? |
**Cory LaNou:** I guess I think that makes sense. Maybe part of my comment there might be because I've been doing Go so long it feels pretty natural, but I guess I do remember when I came online the toolchain I definitely struggled with, and I think that's what you're commenting about. The language not so much, right? |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yes. |
**Cory LaNou:** \[31:56\] But I guess I do remember struggling with "How do I get my tester on? How do I get this to build? How do I install this thing?" That was a lot of searching on Google for me to find that originally, so I can definitely understand that. |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, I kind of feel the same, even for the error messages from the toolchain. There are so many cryptic things... Once you learn what the message means, you are productive and understanding the case, but it just requires you to always google things, and I think that's the goal of my project and how I ... |
**Cory LaNou:** One of the things that I found very helpful in the current toolchain is a little tool that Ben Johnson wrote, it's called GOO. Instead of running Go Test, I run GOO Test all the time; what it does is it detects the very first error in the stack output every time, and copies it to my buffer and it highli... |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah. The feedback I'm gathering is tons of small improvements like this. There are so many things that actually will make us reconsider things, but there are tons of things to improve by just changing the order, making something more highlighted and small - things like that. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And thinking about improving things just by changing orders, I think it would be great if we had a website that was easy to use and contained a path, from beginning to the end, from beginner programmer, newcomer to Go, to very advanced software development. It's not that it's supposed to contain ... |
For example, I ran into this website called go.java - it has nothing to do with Go, it's just called go.java. And it has that - it has four menus at the top. It's Learn Java Skills, Create and Contribute, Develop Software (obviously, for more experienced developers) and Lead Your Organization - if you're an organizatio... |
This past year I've seen the level of resources increasing dramatically, but it's still hard to find... You have to be sort of keeping tabs or searching, and you're not sure, like "Is this the best one that I should be looking at for me?" We don't have that entry point anywhere. I mean, we do have the blogs, of course,... |
**Jaana Dogan:** We've been thinking what Rust has done. They have a book, and it's just like more of canonical guidelines to do anything; it doesn't explain the language, but the entire ecosystem. You know, you have binary, but how to... Maybe we can include best practices for production and things like that. |
I do think that the blog was sort of like being used to publish white papers, but it's not quite organized and it doesn't give you navigation. I really believe that we need some sort of another medium to write guidelines which may also contain what you've been saying, or the thing that I was mentioning with the toolcha... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[36:14\] Awesome. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think that tends to be the struggle. I think there's a lot of resources for teaching the semantics of the language, but then people look at it and they're like, "Okay, how do I get from A to B? I understand these different constructs of the language, but I wanna build a web service. Where d... |
**Jaana Dogan:** We are thinking more than just production of building some of the best practices about building systems. I think the next year or two will be more about trying to understand how we can communicate best practices once you have a Go binary. Yeah, you have a Go binary - what is next? What are the best pra... |
Some of these items require actually some community-wide solutions. The next one or two years will be more like investigating what to do now. The entire ecosystem should be more focused on playing with the binary, rather than achieving the binary. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's interesting. I guess this is probably just part of the growth of a language, right? I mean, we're still very, very early on, so those types of things are maybe the natural progression in a language. How would you contrast that to other languages? |
**Jaana Dogan:** I would say that it's the typical... I mean, the only language I was involved with from the very beginning to the end was Java. I think it's just natural that you expect people to focus on readability idioms, learning the language and mastering it. Then, taking it to the next level is actually about bu... |
I do believe it's natural in every language that the focus will be shifted more to the other aspects, because there will be more knowledge on the idioms in the language. I think it's very natural that we are shifting towards that way. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You said you had some other points you really wanted to discuss, for the wider community to be in on, right? |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, I think understanding what we are going to be working on in the next two years is the biggest challenge we have, because the scale is really big and there are too few people on this project, working full-time. The community is growing, but I do believe that our communication is pretty broken. The... |
\[40:00\] What I really see missing in our community is there's no point of talking about transmission feedback; in the beginning we had more central points, and our community is getting really big, so it's really healthy that we have distributed communities. But as we are getting more distributed, it's so much harder ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's interesting. Have you seen the way the Kubernetes processes developed? This is actually gonna be what I'll mention in the \#FreeSoftwareFriday section, but I think it kind of fits in here. They run special interest groups. There's kind of like split up... |
**Jaana Dogan:** That was basically what I was trying to achieve, I was about to explain. I do believe the only way to get there is creating focus groups and work groups probably. We pretty much have an understanding of which areas we should invest in, and there are already so many people from the community who are wor... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** There seems to be a recognition from you; is this recognition shared by the other Go Team members, and do you find that there is resistance...? Is everybody trying to figure out if this really applies, or are you already moving in the direction of trying to find solutions for that? |
**Jaana Dogan:** In the Go Team there is a subgroup called Cloud-Related Projects we have at Google and beyond. This team is mainly responsible for just making sure that everybody is committed to good APIs and trying to understand how they can support the community... |
For example, this particular subteam was pretty supportive of the workgroups, because their work... As I said, the biggest challenge is the scale is so big, and they would like their work to be impactful. Listening to the community and trying to react according to the necessity of the community requirements is the top ... |
We're trying to establish this workgroup and see if it's going to work, because if our communication is not efficient or if people are not participating, or if we are not really making the communication accessible, this model is not going to work either. So we would like to try with at least one workgroup to see how it... |
Without this structure, or some sort of giving ownership, or more collective feedback from the users or the contributors, it's just impossible to scale the language. |
**Cory LaNou:** \[44:08\] Yeah, I think the micro groups is definitely a way to go there. I think some of it is when you're on a micro level and say, "We just expect the entire world to weigh their opinion in." It's hard, it's not approachable. For me, personally... The Go community is fantastic and I find the people t... |
**Jaana Dogan:** I think the main problem is we don't have a channel to brainstorm ideas. Currently, you have the issue tracker. You have the proposal process, which you definitely need to come up with something really mature and working in order to propose and get it reviewed. There's nothing in between. It's so hard ... |
Ranting on Twitter, or... I think each team member has some capacity, and we need to provide data to them in a more aggregate way, so they can consume and effectively solve issues. |
**Cory LaNou:** I think also just letting the community know that you're looking for direction and you're looking for input too, that will be a big deal. I think most of us just kind of go along our merry way, and we figure "Hey, this is Google. They've got this under control, they know where they're headed", right? |
**Jaana Dogan:** That's not true... I mean, Google actually hired me to work on this project to give feedback to the team. People think that Google has a really big control on this language. Google didn't really care about this language for a very long time; it's becoming more popular very recently, but I think the per... |
**Cory LaNou:** Right. I think my point is - and again, in no way I'm trying to insult Google or Go or the team, I wanna be really clear... I think it's the fact that, you know, I'm pretty involved in the community, so if I've got that perception, and I don't think I'm probably alone there, right? So I think it's one o... |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, I agree. I think this is not really communicated well, but I don't really believe that anybody is against this. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** The people that will form these committees, can they come from outside of Google? |
**Jaana Dogan:** Yeah, absolutely. I don't really believe that having more googlers on this project is going to help, because it really shaped around Google, and it's blocking itself or blocking its reach because it's so totally dependent on the Google culture. I think everything should be outside of Google, ideally. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And for the Google Cloud platform working group - at least that's what I understand - it's already in motion... |
**Jaana Dogan:** \[47:54\] Oh, that's not the Google Cloud. We don't care about a specific provider. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I'm sorry, what working group did you say you were going to start with? |
**Jaana Dogan:** We were thinking about a cloud workgroup more than any provider. We were just trying to understand more production-related stories and beyond - support, APIs, and what we can contribute to the community to make it easier. We're trying to achieve things that are provider-agnostic. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And do you have already any guideline for people to raise their hand and say "I want to participate in this working group"? Do you have criteria for selection for people to join in? |
**Jaana Dogan:** This is still a proposal internally, and I'm working to finalize it. I wrote the proposal myself. The initial idea was to initiate some sort of feedback from different people and understand the requirement for a workgroup, and if people agree, I think what we'll do is just continue. I don't have specif... |
**Erik St. Martin:** And it's published, too. For the Kubernetes groups, the way they operate the special interest groups is there's a published list of them. If you're interested in the way networking works, or scheduling, you have all the contact details there, who the primaries are, they have weekly meetings where t... |
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