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• The Go community lacks a centralized location for case studies |
• Case studies would help demonstrate the benefits of using Go |
• The Go team is shifting focus from early adopters to mainstream users and decision-makers |
• Convincing people to use Go is challenging due to its unique characteristics |
• Reducing the learning curve and demonstrating value are key to adoption |
• Improving user experience, community engagement, and contribution processes for Go is a priority |
• Intimidation of contributing to the Go project due to feeling like one's contributions aren't needed or that they're not smart enough |
• Feedback as a learning opportunity, rather than personal attack or rejection |
• The importance of taking feedback constructively and being willing to make changes |
• A culture shift from focusing on speed over perfection to striving for quality and accuracy |
• Different entry points into the project for those with varying levels of technical experience |
• Appreciation for the Go team's approach, which prioritizes getting things right rather than rushing to completion |
• The importance of tone in feedback and communication |
• Challenges faced by new contributors when receiving direct and technical feedback from the Go team |
• The need for encouragement and constructive feedback to help people feel valued and supported |
• The Go team's efforts to improve their communication style and provide a clear path forward for contributors |
• Examples of projects and maintainers being recognized and appreciated, such as Fatih's Vim-go project and Mark Bates' work on Go Buffalo. |
• Discussion of Postgres and its consistency across command line tools |
• Future plans for supporting other databases (Cassandra, CockroachDB) |
• Preference for consistent database tools to reduce learning curve |
• Conclusion and thank yous from the host and guests |
**Erik St. Martin:** Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of GoTime. Today's episode is number 38, and our sponsors for today are Backtrace and the Ultimate Go Training Series. Today on the show we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Carlisia Pinto is also on the show - say hello, Carlisia... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Hi, everybody. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And standing in for Brian today we have Johnny Boursiquot. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Hey, hey. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And our special guest today is a long-time member of the Go community and has a number of well-known projects that I'm pretty sure all of us have used. He recently became the community manager for the Go team... Please welcome Steve Francia. |
**Steve Francia:** Hey! |
**Erik St. Martin:** So how's things in the Go community management world? Actually, give everybody a little bit of a background on yourself first, for anybody who might not be familiar with you already. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And tell us your correct title, because I don't think that's it. |
**Steve Francia:** That is not my correct title... We can start there. My correct title isn't all that accurate either, but I'm the Go team technical program manager, with an emphasis on the external usage of Go. But it's really an interesting role that does have community management as a part of it. Also, a good eleme... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So this is from the perspective of people outside of Google itself, and their usage of Go and their needs, as opposed to internal...? |
**Steve Francia:** It's all-purpose, but it's not specific to Google's needs. I treat Google like every other company that uses Go. We definitely are listening to their needs, but I'm not focused on those needs any more than I am any company that uses Go. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** So do you have a counterpart inside of Google who is focused on what Google needs from Go? Or how does that strategy work out? |
**Steve Francia:** There's another project manager that's focused on cloud usage, and he does both internal, but primarily external usage. I don't know if we have yet, but we're looking to bring in someone similar to work with internal users and understand them a little better. But for the last few months, I've been ki... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I remember when you first joined in this capacity at Google, one of the very first things you were involved in was the whole dependency management conversation. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Is that something that you're sort of pushing internally, or did you just sort of bring it in as something to be addressed and then move on to other things? How does that relationship between the community and you advocating on our behalf to Google - how does that work, typically? |
**Steve Francia:** \[04:02\] As someone -- we didn't really go into my background yet, so I'll speak briefly to it, because it's a good introduction to this topic. Prior to joining Google and the Go team at Google, I ran engineering in open source at Docker, and before that I ran engineering and lead open source in the... |
[Hugo](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo) is one of them, it's a website generator. When I sat down to write it, I knew how I wanted it to work, but there was libraries that I needed to create it that didn't exist yet, so I wrote a number of libraries in tandem with Hugo. One of them is called [Cobra](https://github.com... |
The team does listen to the users and tries to understand... One of the challenges is that the team works inside the Google infrastructure, so dependency management was something that they didn't have their own intimate familiarity with, in the same way that the users experience it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think also in addition to that though, there's also a distinction for who's responsibility is it, right? Is dependency management part of the language or not, right? |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah. Through a series of conversations we've tried a couple different things. One was we formed a working group, and I was closely part of this; [Peter Bourgon](https://twitter.com/peterbourgon) really drove this effort, to kind of address this need. It was a combination of people from the community... |
I'm not sure what conversation or experience arrived at that, but that was a critical thing for us to understand, because all the efforts by the community can only go so far. Without the Go leadership understanding the need, and realizing that it's something that to really be successful we need to make all of the tooli... |
There's still a long road ahead to delivering the right solution, but the work that the working group is doing is a huge first step towards that. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Just to get that straight... Peter Bourgon was leading the design and the specs, and [Sam Boyer](https://twitter.com/sdboyer) is leading the implementation - is that right? |
**Steve Francia:** \[07:57\] I wouldn't frame it that way. I think Peter's leading the efforts. Peter is the one who really got the group together and ensured that they had meetings regularly and kind of set up the schedule. I'd call him more like a project lead. There's four people on the working group; I think Sam is... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, we had him talking to us two I think. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think it was two episodes back. Yeah, I think Sam focused on the packaging solver, kind of like the dependencies. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, Sam loves GPS and that problem, and he's really spent a lot of time on it, so it makes sense that he'd be focused on it. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And I don't want to leave a question unanswered... [Cory LaNou](https://twitter.com/corylanou) is asking who is the person on the Google Cloud's side that's doing the work of advocacy? I think that must be [Francesc Campoy](https://twitter.com/francesc)? |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, Frances is the advocate for all of Go and Google Cloud, as well. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Got it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Recently - this was just a couple of days ago - you had published a survey from 2016 on the Go blog. I'd love to chat a little bit about that and maybe some of the things that surprised you, some of the things that you're proud about, things that you wanna work on in the future based on what you ob... |
**Steve Francia:** Yes, so for those who aren't familiar, the Go team has never done a survey of this kind before, and it was a pretty massive undertaking; to be honest, I've never done a survey of this kind before either, but I recognize that there was definitely a need to get data from our users and to listen to them... |
I will say a lot of the things that we learned were confirmations of the things that we had already suspected, but by doing a survey, it gave us great metrics around knowing... Like, "Okay, we know this is a problem for some users... Now we know this is a problem for 30% of users", where before it was somewhat speculat... |
So a lot of the things were reinforcement, but also giving a lot more accuracy into the extent of some of the challenges that we had. And of course, there were some new things that surprised -- I won't speak for the whole Go team, but there were definitely things in here that surprised me when I saw them. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think the other thing that doing the survey and having the metrics works well for is being able to basically timeline it out and to look next year and see how much you've grown and solved some of these problems. Prior to that, like you said, it's all been speculation. |
**Steve Francia:** I think one of the great things here is we do establish a baseline, and we're able to see progress and how the community and user base evolves over time. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, one of the things I was surprised to see was more than half of the participants use Go at work, and we can only speculate about a couple of years ago, but I'd have to venture a guess that there were a few big companies using Go in 2013-2014, but I'd say most people were probably hobbyists bac... |
**Steve Francia:** \[12:05\] Yeah, if we go back... It depends how far we go back, but there was certainly a point - probably around the first GopherCon - when it was clear that Go was of interest to a large group of people, and yet the adoption wasn't quite there. And that's a normal growth curve of any technology - c... |
I guess we were all fortunate that Go developed the interest, and as we've seen it progress, companies are adopting Go more and more readily, so more and more users are being paid to write Go. |
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