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**Erik St. Martin:** What do you think the developer pool looks like right now? Obviously, you can only speculate there, but do you think that people have a hard time finding Go developers right now? |
**Steve Francia:** I think there's a number of different factors to this. The first one is Go is actually a really easy language to learn and to pick up, and especially to read. This makes it so that a lot of companies aren't looking for Go developers; they're transitioning existing developers to Go, and that's a viabl... |
It's also the case that we don't have a great marketplace yet to find Go developers, especially ones with experience, because Go is relatively young, so a lot of job requisites... You need to have 5-10 years Java experience, or whatever the language is. It's gonna be very hard to find a Go developer with five years exp... |
So it's kind of an interesting dynamic... I think in time this is one of the things that will definitely sort itself out, but it's pretty easy to adopt Go, and at the same time, the language being so young, it's hard to find people with many years of experience. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** This is where I think that obviously the makeup of the community is critical as well. I think in my travels to the Go community I find very enthusiastic people within the community. They're passionate about the language, and beyond that, they're passionate about building a great community. If you... |
We do a lot within the Go community, whether it's through meetups or through community events... There's a lot going on to attract people to the community. I think that's gonna help a lot. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, I think it's always a chicken and the egg problem here, but I think we've got a great community and really passionate people that love the language. And yes, a little more than half are using Go at work, which is great, but slightly higher is the number of people who are programming Go outside ... |
I think there's some work that we need to do to make Go -- around the resources... Not really changing the language, but better resources and more support around our new users, but I think there's a lot of the core ingredients there that make Go just a wonderful language, and people are gonna adopt it; people are alre... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[16:20\] There is so much to talk about community, and there's a lot about community in the survey... One thing that caught my attention related to community is a question that says, "What is the biggest challenge facing the Go project today?" and the top answer with about two percent (there wer... |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, so one of the challenges we have with the survey is it's really easy to present accurate results with multiple choice, or questions with already determined answers. And questions that had open text box answers - it's much harder to present that data. What we've done here is really kind of a sim... |
Reality is I was able to read all of the answers to every question, and there were tens of thousands of comments that people left. In this specific question there really wasn't a theme that emerged. I don't think there are things that the users really fear as big challenges the Go project faces. |
I think there was a bunch of comments that people expressed, and a lot of them were even comments that said, "Because of this, we don't really have concerns." So in this specific question, there's not a lot you can gain from that chart. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright... Because basically if I said "The community needs to come to a consensus on dependency management", dependency management is actually the thing that should be bumped up, not the word 'community', right? |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, exactly. A good example of a question where this did work well is when we asked people about what would improve the Go documentation. Overwhelmingly, the most common word was 'examples'. In reading through the hundreds of responses that we got to that, it was very clearly the case that users wa... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Along those lines... The survey tried to also gauge what other languages are people coming from, that are sort of adopting Go. I'd be interested in your take of whether Go itself is seen as an elitist language, that it attracts a certain kind of developer or a certain kind of individual with prev... |
**Steve Francia:** I heard a few different questions there, and I'll try and address each of them. For me, one of the big surprises from the survey was often I think of Go - and I think most of us do - as a language that people convert to from a different language... Mostly because Go is such a new language, most peopl... |
\[20:19\] I think one of the interesting things that I learned from the survey was one-third of the people who said that they had experience in Go said that that was the language they had the most experience in, more than any other language. This for me conveyed the idea that Go isn't just a language for people to conv... |
I think that was really interesting... I didn't expect that, and partly, I guess, I come in with my own perspective. I knew a good number of languages before Go, but it's interesting that a lot of users consider it their language of most experience. In fact, more users were in that bucket than any other bucket. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I'm actually really surprised by that, because I probably come in with the same preconceptions, that most of us have experiences with other languages, we have years of history with those languages, so it takes a long time for our skill in Go to overtake our knowledge in a language we came from. So ... |
**Steve Francia:** For me what I realized was a lot of people are coming from dynamic languages. JavaScript and Python are the two biggest languages; there's others in the list, but there are definitely some properties of dynamic languages that differ from Go. If we look at a lot of the documentation, the experience th... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think it's about time for our first sponsored break, but after that I wanna chat a little bit about the way people are using Go, because I found some of that stuff interesting, too. Our first sponsor for today is Backtrace. |
**Break:** \[22:54\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, we are back talking to Steve Francia, and we're talking about the 2016 survey results and some of the stuff that we find interesting there. Before the break I mentioned the uses of Go. One of the things that I actually found surprising was that web development actually seemed to overtake s... |
**Steve Francia:** \[24:25\] I'll clarify a little bit... We asked two questions, and they're easy to mix up because they're very related. One was "What areas do you work in?" and in that one, web development was overwhelmingly the number one option. If I think about that... I work for Google - is that a web developmen... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's fair. |
**Steve Francia:** Google probably checks a lot of these boxes, actually... But the internet is such a prevalent part of what people do... At first I was surprised by that, but the more I thought about it -- you know, there's a lot of companies that are in web development, and this was one of the questions where you co... |
But there's another question, "What do you write in Go?" and in this one "web services", defined as a service returning HTML, was still over 50% of what people used Go to create. Now, this was another one where the total percentage is added up far more than a hundred, because people could choose more than one. But I th... |
**Erik St. Martin:** And even though they don't rank as high on the list, other surprising ones that were in there were embedded devices, people writing Internet of Things devices using Go. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah... It was interesting the spectrum that -- in the options that we asked, a lot of them were well represented. It showed a lot more diversity than I expected. I'll just speak for myself there, I was surprised by the diversity of the different areas that people worked in and used Go. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. I've heard of some embedded stuff and security stuff, but I didn't think that it was enough to register. I didn't think it would show up, I thought it would be lumped into other... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So when you look at these answers in particular, Steve, do you have a feeling that the answers that are more popular by the areas where you want to invest in, or the opposite, you wanna bring up the areas that are less popular? |
**Steve Francia:** It's a good question... I honestly don't think popularity was a big factor for what we were gonna invest in, alone; I think it's a combination of looking at where our weaknesses are, and comparing that to what the demand is for those things, and trying to pair those together. A lot of this post ident... |
One of the things that I felt best from this was most of the challenges, the vast majority of the challenges identified were ones that were (I'll call them) growing pains for a new technology that's really emerging into the mainstream. Not many of the challenges were really fundamental things. In fact, I would posit th... |
\[28:12\] I think if we look at the challenges, many of them would apply across all of those industries, or most of those industries. There were not many challenges that we looked at that applied only to one. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And what challenges are these that you're thinking about? |
**Steve Francia:** For me, from reading through all this, I think we identified a number of challenges. When we asked people what changes would improve Go most, they identified pretty clearly what I think are two of our biggest challenges. One is the lack of generics. I know sometimes we feel like it's a broken record,... |
Package management was the second highest identified change that would improve Go the most. Now, we look beyond those, just what would improve Go, and we see another picture of people's user experience. When we asked people what's the biggest challenge they face using Go, it kind of shed some new light on people's indi... |
There's also something that came forward here, which was it's not the easiest thing for users to convey the value of Go to other people, particularly to their management. I think there's a lot of things we can do there, but one of the things that I thought of (pretty obvious) was there's a lot of companies that are usi... |
I think there's a lot of places where we can point to, you know, "This company is using Go, and how it transformed them. This other company, because of Go, they were able to reduce their costs. Because of Go, this other company, they were able to deliver a project much faster than they would have with their existing sy... |
I think that there's a lot that we can do to just surface some of the great things that Go is already doing. That will help some of these challenges. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Is there somewhere like a canonical place for case studies for people who do that? I know we commonly see them pop up on Reddit and Hacker News, and reduced from 2,000 servers to two and things like that, but I don't think there's a single place that we could point an executive to show them a bunch... |
**Steve Francia:** There isn't that I'm aware of today, but I believe that there will be some time during 2017, or at least I'd like there to be. Go is changing - or I'll say the audience for Go is changing a bit. If you look at our web page and the material around it, it hasn't changed in a number of years. It's reall... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[32:14\] Yeah, and it's difficult too, even just in the convincing teammates thing. Even people who have been in the Go world for a number of years, it's "Give me your elevator pitch for why you should use Go", and it's really hard to think of just like a silver bullet; it's all the little things ... |
**Steve Francia:** I don't wanna misquote our users, but I think what came through from reading all the commentary was people that use Go really love it. I think it was pretty clear, like "If you try Go, you'll see why", but it's hard to convey that until you try it. And I think you articulated well why - it's not like... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I usually tell people that they have to try it and stick to it for a while, so they can get that experience. It doesn't come right away; it's not like you write a Hello World little program and you get it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** But there's a struggle in learning or adopting any technology, and you need to... I think Katrina Owen put it really well during her talk, it's like "Your need for learning it needs to overcome your need to quit." You have to have a reason to wanna learn that so bad that you kind of suffer through ... |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, I think that's well put, and there's really two different ways to address that, and if we do it right, we'll address them both. One is reduce that learning curve. Get rid of a lot of the parts that are painful for people; make it easier to learn. The second one is demonstrate the value that peo... |
I think if we can approach it from both sides, that's definitely something that we collectively as the Go community can help to improve. I definitely know that's something I'm gonna be focused on over the next year. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Talking about what you're gonna be focused on over the next year, can you give us an idea of what's in the pipeline, the order, the priorities...? What's the biggest thing for this year? |
**Steve Francia:** For me, my role is really gonna be focused on the user experience and what it means to be a part of our community, and supporting that as much as possible. I can't give you my full playbook for the year, because honestly, I'm still writing it. I think it's a very evolving thing, but I can tell you so... |
One area we're trying to improve is the ability for people to contribute to the Go project, and in additional capacities - not just in programming, but in other capacities. And there's efforts underway to improve that, and we hope to really increase the number of contributors to the Go project. |
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