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**Kavya Joshi:** No... That would have been quite convenient. No, I think the way that talk came to be was I heard about the race detector and I used it, and I was like "Wow, this is really cool. I wonder how it works." I have a masters in CS, and as part of my masters I was in a group that did distributed systems and ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's actually interesting... The race detector has been really cool since it came out; I never knew how it worked under the covers, with the vector clocks and things like that. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, I thought it was really cool how something that I only mostly read about in the context of distributed systems was implemented in this tool. The relation is obvious, right? Because you're talking about concurrency... But the translation of ideas was quite cool. I thought it was pretty neat. |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[04:07\] Funny story about the race detector - I think it was at the second [GopherCon](https://www.gophercon.com/)... One of the speakers, Blake Caldwell was at the speaker dinner and he was raving about how awesome the race detector was, and the person next to him, who happened to be [Dmitry](ht... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Oh yeah... Dmitry has done a lot of cool stuff. Some of the other tools he's come up, like [Go Fuzz](https://github.com/dvyukov/go-fuzz), seems neat, all the work on the scheduler... All very interesting. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, it's hard to follow all this stuff that some of the people on the Go team are doing... So many great contributions. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yup. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So that talk is still super valuable... I think it was mid-last year, or was it the year before that you did that talk at StrangeLoop? |
**Kavya Joshi:** That was last StrangeLoop, so September 2016. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, so it's still very relevant for anybody who's interested in how things work under the covers. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, and I think that's my favorite type of talk to give or material to present... It's going beneath the surface - I find that interesting, and I think it adds a lot of value to people's understanding of systems, which is cool. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think I love the idea of learning at least one or two layers below the things you use. I think probably from an engineering perspective a lot of it is because there's a lot of leaky abstractions... Abstractions are great when everything works perfectly, but when things start to go wrong, yo... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Plus, it's just super geeky to know how some of this stuff works... Like, "Why do you know how the scheduler works?" You're like, well, you see, I had this odd question one day, and I was like "How does that work?" |
**Kavya Joshi:** \[laughs\] "And I ended up spending like 20 hours on it, so now I can tell you all about it." |
**Erik St. Martin:** At least these are things that are useful later. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yup. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Kavya, one of the things I actually found quite interesting in that talk was how I sort of got into the vector clocks and how they're used... That was the first time I'd seen the applicability of vector clocks in that way. The illustrations you were using were on point in describing that and maki... |
**Kavya Joshi:** That's a good question. I think in terms of the flow, that's how it made sense to me. But while creating the content, I explicitly was trying to make it accessible for people with computer science backgrounds, but not necessarily knowledge on the topics that I was going to talk about or I was going to ... |
I think in taking something that's deeply technical and making that approachable and accessible -- first of all, it's interesting because it's sort of a challenge. It's like "I have all this background knowledge, but I'm going to try to explain it to somebody who might not necessarily have that background knowledge. Th... |
\[08:05\] I think the second thing about that is presenting a technical idea in an accessible manner I think only results in betterness, and better systems, and producing more interesting conversations, and sharing knowledge in a way that is accessible. |
Here is a concrete example. [Julia Evans](https://twitter.com/b0rk) does a great job of explaining how to use system tools like `strace` or `netcat`, and she does a really good job of taking away the barrier to using those tools. Similarly, I have a friend who really likes performance engineering, and talks about profi... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I really love Julia Evans' drawings. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, those [zines](https://jvns.ca/zines/) are pretty rad. I ended up printing a bunch of them and giving them to my interns. It was great. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I love the point that Kavya's making about presenting technical content in an accessible manner, and I'm thinking here as Go is growing so fast and people are coming into the language, how do people who are writing technical content and who are writing and giving presentations - how can they do t... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Gosh, I wish I had knowledge that I could speak about in general... I think when I write a talk or an article, I spend a lot of time thinking about the presentation of the content. Things like "What order to present it in? What diagram, what animation would make it most intuitive for somebody listening... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think a lot of it comes from our assumptions of what we assume everybody else knows. In computer science especially, more and more people are coming without formal education, so that assumption of having a formal background in computer science can be difficult. I know there's a lot of concepts th... |
It's almost like if you start at a new company and you're not familiar with the domain. When everybody is speaking in acronyms and all kinds of things that you don't already understand, the whole business of what you're building can seem completely confusing and out of reach. But once you start learning the vocabulary,... |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, and I think that's a great analogy. Your target audience - they aren't necessarily beginners, or they aren't necessarily people without computer science backgrounds... It's just that they don't have the background knowledge that you do, because of all the time you've spent prepping for the talk, ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[12:03\] I thought it was a worthwhile question to ask you, this question of like if you have any tips to share about how to prepare content, because I saw your talk at StrangeLoop a long time ago, and it was excellently done. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Thank you. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Like Johnny said, it conveyed really well the concepts of the race detector and things that had to do with it. For example for me, one thing that I do - and I'm not claiming I'm even any good at it, but I just go from "Okay, does the quality of my writing improve tremendously if I finish and I sl... |
So whatever people can do to make the content better, even if it has to wait, I think it's so worthwhile, because it will benefit so much more, rather than putting something out there that's concise, but not everybody's going to really get it... Blog posts, CFP submissions - it all becomes just a lot of noise. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So I think you were on the track of saying what it is that you do... If you have more items that you want to share, that would be great. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yeah, I guess getting your content reviewed by somebody you trust... I've worked with a lot of great people, and something like having them read through the article and just tell me if it makes sense, as an outsider... We're very good about getting our code reviewed all the time, right? Code review sys... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** That makes sense. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** One of the recommendations for beginners in Go is to avoid the goroutines and dealing with concurrency primitives, the channels and what not... Don't jump into the deep end right away, because there's a whole different world there that you don't necessarily have to have for a lot of programs that... |
So for somebody who basically doesn't typically program in a multithreaded environment and they need to sort of "Okay, I know I've been told not to jump in, but now I feel like I'm ready to jump in. I need to know some things, I need to have some background that's gonna help me to tackle concurrency in Go, and do it th... |
**Kavya Joshi:** I think the Go Docs do a great job... There's the walkthrough tutorial which explains the basic concepts pretty well. But then I think the best way to learn is to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. There's several open source Go projects... If you go and walk through the code, probably bust ou... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[16:07\] I'm trying to think, who wrote the Go Concurrency Visualization tool? |
**Kavya Joshi:** Oh, that's really cool! |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's super cool to play with and understand how these things are happening in parallel. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Yes, I know the tool you're talking about, but I'm blanking on the author's name as well. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** There's a recorded [GopherCon video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyuFeiG3Y60&t=2s), right? Is that what you're thinking about, Erik? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah... His name is escaping me. The number of speakers at the conference is growing so big... It's over a hundred in total, across all the years, to remember... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** It's a good problem to have, right? |
**Kavya Joshi:** You're one of the organizers, is that right? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yes, yes. |
**Kavya Joshi:** Cool. Is organizing GopherCon just insane at this point? |
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