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We're also trying to build more open and inclusive - we call them community working groups, where people are in an organized working group and are working towards a solution, or to address a need in Go. |
\[36:07\] This is somewhat new territory for Go, and every community need to figure out how it's going to do this. That's in the place that we're in, we're trying to figure it out... We're gonna run a little experiment over the next few months with our first inclusive working group, which you'll be hearing about pretty... |
Other things that I'm working on is trying to -- well, first, just make sure that all of the events around the world are supported. There's a number of Go conferences which all of you on the call know about, as all of you are responsible for at least one of them, and so am I. So we're all responsible for at least one o... |
Then I'm also working pretty hard on the new user experience, what it feels like coming to Go, from the very beginning of going to our website, to installing Go, to going through other things, whether it's the tour or the documentation, but what it is to learn Go. I think that's gonna keep me busy for most of the year,... |
A lot of these things are somewhat interactive and experimental. We're gonna try things and do experiments. Some of them are gonna work, and we're gonna double down on the ones that do; some of them aren't gonna work, and we're gonna learn why and we're gonna try and continue to evolve our approach. |
**Erik St. Martin:** One of the things you mentioned was actually contributing, and I wanted to dig into that a little bit... But first, let's take our second sponsored break. Our second sponsor for today is Ultimate Go. |
**Break:** \[38:07\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, and we're back, talking to Steve Francia. Before we took the sponsored break, we were talking about your goals for this year, and you had mentioned contribution to the project. That was really interesting, to see how many people felt that they weren't welcome. It really took me off-guard t... |
**Steve Francia:** \[39:42\] I'll say what my opinion is about this; I can't speak to if the survey responses -- because we didn't ask this specific question as a free text response, but I think one of the things is, if you look at the Go team... This is my personal opinion - I look at the Go team and I see Rob Pike, R... |
I was talking to [Katrina Owen](https://twitter.com/kytrinyx) about this, and I asked her "How do you feel?" and she said, "I feel like as long as I'm one of the smartest people alive, that I'm welcome to contribute." I'm paraphrasing her, those weren't her exact words. I kind of felt the same way, and then I became a ... |
The first one is "We do need your help." There's a lot of work to be done, and we absolutely do need more people to contribute. The project will not be successful as it should be without your help. The second one, you are smart enough to contribute, and reality is don't be discouraged when people give you feedback that... |
I've been fortunate for the last few months to see how the team interacts with each other, and they are constantly giving each other feedback, and it is very normal for people to go through many revisions of something before you get it right. That's how you learn, that's how you grow. The team is willing to give that k... |
So regardless of your technical experience, there's different areas that you're gonna be able to contribute to, and through that you'll learn the process and you'll get to know the people, and you'll be adding a lot of value. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I guess that's a fair observation too, that a lot of people might feel intimidated and embarrassed when their code review comes up, the way they do... Not everybody perceives the feedback the same way; some people take it more personally, other people see it as a learning opportunity, to learn from... |
**Steve Francia:** This is also one of the few questions -- because we were able to segment the data in lots of different ways and try and learn from that... This was one of the few questions where people that were not active Go users - as defined by they didn't select "I use Go at work" or "I use Go not at work"... So... |
\[44:18\] What conclusions can we draw from that? I don't think we can draw exact conclusions, but I think we can speculate that it's likely because they aren't as familiar with the process. You always feel welcome until you're closer, and then you recognize that "Oh, this is kind of intimidating." |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and I think some of the other stuff too is there's a lot of quick wins and stuff in the GitHub issues. Some of the Gerrit stuff can get confusing, but there's also a lot of formal papers that go back and forth, and working documents where people will work on... You know, you always see that t... |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, so for me there's been a bit of a culture shift joining Google and joining the Go team, because most of my background is startups. I'm really trying to learn this lesson - the Go team really cares about getting things right and doing things the right way; in startups, there's often pressure to ... |
Definitely, part of it is recognize that they're trying to make you or your contributions even better than they are, so it's not about rejecting you or your contributions, it's about helping to make them even better. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think it's important to take the feedback constructively, that it's not a personal attack, and it's really hard sometimes. I remember one of the first contributions I ever tried to make - this was a few years ago - several of the Go team I think were going back and forth on the ticket; they... |
**Steve Francia:** There's also an observation that I've made over the last few months: if there's not a right answer that emerges, the Go team leadership is not against postponing it until there is one. So the need to have something versus the need to have the right thing... Again, this for me is a bit of a culture sh... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[48:09\] That's one of the things when we talk about the little things that are part of the language and the way the team and the community operates... I think that that's one of the things we can appreciate, because Go doesn't have a lot of baggage and weird quirks because of these things that we... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \*coughs\* JavaScript \*coughs\*. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, it's been really enlightening to me to see... So, one of the privileges of my job is to participate in a weekly proposal review meeting, and to see the thought and care that goes into every single proposal, which anyone can make. Anyone can make a proposal as an issue on GitHub, and every singl... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Johnny, were you about to say something? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** No, I was taking a jab at JavaScript, when you said "rushing things out and paying for the consequences later." \[laughter\] But to your point, Steve, it's hard to interpret tone when you're getting the feedback. Just today I was watching some feedback between Matt Aimonetti, a well-known member ... |
The Go team members were then sort of chiming in, going back and forth... Although it was very cordial, the back and forth was very to the point. There was no sugar coating, it was all about technical details or implications of taking on such a feature. The things that perhaps Matt didn't know about that the Go team kn... |
From the outside looking in, you're thinking "Wow, is the Go team mad at him for making these suggestions?", but I'm pretty sure that's not how they're seeing it. It's really just about giving you the raw technical impact of -- that raw feedback. There was no sugar coating about it. I think that's something that can be... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that when people are very busy, as the Go team I'm sure is, they skip a lot of the pleasantries. The Go team's responses are very succinct and matter-of-fact. People read it the way they mean to read it. So if you come into the process feeling intimidated and then you get a very succint ans... |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, I think you said it well. This is something that I know the Go team is actually working on - the fact is people are taking a step of courage to propose something or to send a patch, and they have a lot of emotion sometimes riding on that, and when you have someone that you admire (I will say) s... |
\[52:10\] I know as a team, we've been working on how to communicate in a way that's encouraging. It's a work in progress, but in my 6-7 months here I've seen improvement of that; people are not just saying no, they're saying "Here's why no" or "Here's what we need for this to go further." So to give them a path forwar... |
I think that's a big thing for us that the Go team is learning - people take our words with a lot more weight than sometimes we realize. We're trying to be better about understanding people's feelings. That's something we're working on. |
But I will say the team itself cares deeply about their users and community, and each other. I've honestly never been part of a team that really supported each other as well as this team. I see the way that we talk about the community and the amount of time and attention that we spend on the users, and it's remarkable ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think even outside community involvement helps too, right? Most in the same respect that teambuilding exercises help with co-workers. You interact with people in a different form and you learn that they're people, and things like that, and then your interactions with them in the work environment ... |
I know coming for me personally, getting to see and watch the Go team interact with people at conferences really shows how much they care about what people are using the language for, and that it's meeting their needs and things like that. So when you see those succinct or matter-of-fact responses, you don't really thi... |
**Steve Francia:** It's also the case that the team itself knows each other pretty well, and some of the more active contributors, I think you always need to be reminded of -- a lot of our conversations and dialogues are done completely open and transparent, the vast majority of it. And even if we know each other well,... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I know you're a pretty busy guy, and I think we're about out of time. I think we have a couple of minutes though if everybody wants to do \#FreeSoftwareFriday. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I actually don't have one today. |
**Erik St. Martin:** How about you, Johnny? Do you wanna give a shoutout to a project or a maintainer? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, definitely [Go Buffalo](https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo). I've been playing around with it to sort of stand up a project that I've taken on, and I was quite surprised how easy it was to get going... I mean, obviously, beyond reading just the introductory stuff on the main page (I think... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[56:03\] How about you, Steve? Did you wanna give a shoutout to anybody? |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, for me the one project that I use more than any other project is Fatih's [Vim-go](https://github.com/fatih/vim-go) project. I've been a long-time user of Vim, and one of my projects that's been popular for a while is my Vim Distribution, which is really just my own personal Vim configuration th... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think it was Vim and VS Code that were topping everybody out. |
**Steve Francia:** Well, Vim was overwhelmingly the most used, and VS Code was, for me shockingly, the second most, given how young it is. But it just barely edged out... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Over Atom. |
**Steve Francia:** ... IntelliJ and Atom and Sublime. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay, so Vim-go far surpassed number two. |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Fatih's work on that has just been tremendous. I use it as well. He's got a Patreon set up too for anybody who uses that. We all love to show support to people who work on these projects and give up their free time. |
So one that I actually only recently started using which is really cool, I guess it's called [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql), for Universal SQL. It's written in Go, and it allows you to talk to SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres - all using the same command line tool. And one of the cool things that I lik... |
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