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• Comparison between Go.dev and existing resources such as Reddit and Twitter communities |
• Challenges of balancing scope and depth in curating resources for a wide audience |
• Plans for internationalization and potential future additions to the site |
**Mat Ryer:** Hello, and welcome to GoTime! I'm Mat Ryer. Today we're talking about Go.dev. It's a user-friendly hub of curated resources for Go, and we're lucky enough to have three of the brains behind it joining us today: Carmen Andoh, Steve Francia (also known as @spf13) and Julie Qiu. Hello, everybody! |
**Steve Francia:** Hi! |
**Julie Qiu:** Hi! |
**Mat Ryer:** We're also joined by Jon Calhoun, a regular. Hi, Jon. How are you? |
**Jon Calhoun:** Hi, Mat. I'm doing well. |
**Mat Ryer:** What's been going on? |
**Jon Calhoun:** Not too much. |
**Mat Ryer:** Okay, well let's get started. I wanna hear all about Go.dev, so who wants to give me an intro? What is it, and what's it for? |
**Steve Francia:** I can share that. It is a new official Go website for our Go community. It's intended to be a single destination, where the entire community can gather. Today it contains learning resources, it contains a package discovery or a module discovery component, and it also contains different resources to b... |
**Mat Ryer:** And this is not gonna replace Golang.org, is it? |
**Steve Francia:** No. |
**Mat Ryer:** So they're gonna coexist, those two. |
**Steve Francia:** They're gonna coexist, yeah. That's right. |
**Mat Ryer:** And the difference then being, I guess, the Golang.org is the kind of open source home, it's the technical home of the project itself. |
**Steve Francia:** We struggled a lot... Creating two websites is not always the best thing. Two websites could create more confusion, and we initially started trying to expand Golang.org to contain all these things, and we really struggled with that because the intent of Golang.org - which if you don't know, actually ... |
Eventually, after a few months of trying to figure out how to shoehorn these competing goals into this existing site, we realized that maybe they're best as two separate sites. So the Golang.org is gonna remain the way it is, and the second site is really curated content that's created by the Go community and for the G... |
**Mat Ryer:** Right. So how did it get started then? Was this something that you internally saw that there was something missing, or was this something that the community asked for? |
**Steve Francia:** It's an interesting answer to that question, and I like the way you framed it. |
**Mat Ryer:** I'll be the judge of whether the answer is interesting or not, Steve, if you don't mind... \[laughter\] |
**Steve Francia:** So we actually started this project over four years ago. |
**Mat Ryer:** Really? |
**Steve Francia:** As a community member, I was talking to the Go leadership at Google about potentially joining, and it was in a new role that they'd never really had someone do before... So as part of that, I wrote a document that was from my community member perspective of the things that were missing, that we neede... |
And on that document, it had - and I'll read it to you - it was "Provide educational resources for Go adoption and best practices, working with partners to create and provide the best training materials. Write the story of the value of Go and communicate that story broadly. Solve the problem of discoverability of libra... |
The idea behind this wasn't necessarily one project at the time, but those were all things that started at that point, over four years ago. Fast-forward -- and I'll also say, that document also had other things; the Go user surveys came out of that document, which we've just finished doing our fourth one of those. Impr... |
So now we fast-forward to me joining Google... I worked with Russ and Samir to obtain the right staffing, by presenting these concepts to the Google leadership. And they did, they gave us the opportunity to expand the team, which led to hiring Carmen and Julie, who then did most of the heavy-lifting of bringing the pro... |
**Mat Ryer:** Great. Well, thank you very much for doing all that excellent work. The thing you mentioned about package discovery is quite an interesting one, because for a while in the beginning of Go there weren't that many packages; over time, of course, it's grown, and so now people actually have a lot of different... |
**Steve Francia:** This is not a Go problem. We think this is a modern software development problem. As you kind of get critical mass, the problem gets bigger, as you're saying... But it's a problem that every language is struggling with right now. Some to an extreme, and some -- I think Go is actually on the smaller e... |
**Mat Ryer:** And will it take into account things like if packages have stopped being maintained, or if they do things that are generally accepted to not be great patterns, and things like that? Is it gonna be opinionated in that way? |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah, I definitely think it's something that we've talked about and considered adding for the future. Right now, if you think about the Go ecosystem, the thing that's really out there is GoDoc.org, which provides package documentation... But it's missing a lot of this information about "Is this package s... |
**Mat Ryer:** Julie, you spoke at -- I've seen it a couple of times, actually... You do a talk about how to select good dependencies, and what to look for in things. Anyone interested in that should definitely have a search around. It's a great talk, and you talk about things like "Are there tests in this package?" Wha... |
**Julie Qiu:** If I had to bucket it, I would say that the three main things to think about are popularity, quality and stability. By popularity, what we're really wondering is "Are other people using this package?" The reason that that's really important is because it essentially gives you a little bit of a heuristic ... |
Say the author suddenly decides that they don't really want anything to do with this package; what are the chances that someone else is gonna step up? What are the chances that they're gonna look for bugs? What are the chances that if I make a big part of my codebase depend on this, I can count on this being there in t... |
I think quality is things like "Is it a well-documented package? Does the code have tests? Does it look essentially like idiomatic Go code to me?" And you want that, because it gives you a sense of how familiar the package author is maybe with creating Go packages. And essentially what you're evaluating when you look a... |
And then the third thing is essentially stability. Obviously, technology changes, the Go ecosystem changes, and so as things are changing, can I count on this author to think about where I am with my project? Something you don't wanna see is someone had an exported function in one version, and then all of a sudden in t... |
**Jon Calhoun:** One of our actual listeners had asked the question "Will any of this data that you guys are using to figure out what packages are there - I'm assuming you'll be gathering some data - be made publicly available?" The specific question they were asking was "When you're looking at packages, one of the way... |
**Julie Qiu:** It sounds like that information is -- they're looking for what a package is importing, and then what a package is being imported by. All of that information actually is already available today on pkg.go.dev. |
What you would do is for any package that you're interested, you can click on the Imports tab to see what other packages it's using; or on the flip side, you can look at the Imported By tab and see who else is using this. |
**Mat Ryer:** That's cool. And that's different to GoDoc, isn't it? That new pkg.go.dev. |
**Julie Qiu:** Mm-hm. |
**Steve Francia:** GoDoc is just documentation, and the intent for pkg.go.dev is to be much more encompassing of these more rich information around each package. |
**Mat Ryer:** Right, yeah. |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah, there is some information about imports and importers on GoDoc.org, but our goal is to take this information and bucket it in a way that's something that people care about a lot more. |
One thing that you might notice on the Imported By tab is that we tend to group the importers and count them depending on not just like -- say Kubernetes has one package, and they're importing this one thing 1,000 times. We wanna be thoughtful about how much that weighs into the popularity of the package. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, I see. Can you explain that a bit more? |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah. So if you think about it like "Why do I care about popularity?", essentially what it's answering is telling me how many people have decided to use this package and integrate it into their codebase. One thing is that you might notice there's one repository - let's call it julieqiu.org/foo - and I ha... |
You can think about this in sort of like "Maybe I'll count it as a million importers, but the way that users might wanna see it is that all of it is grouped under one thing", so that you can answer questions like "Does one big organization use it, or does one really important module use it", without seeing just a giant... |
**Mat Ryer:** Right, that makes sense. Something else you mention in your talk, Julie, is about looking at dependencies for packages - how many dependencies another dependency has. So if you're gonna important a package - say you've got two options. It might be sensible to choose the one that has fewer dependencies... ... |
**Julie Qiu:** Well, the funny thing is that a lot of times it feels like it isn't our problem, until it is. In my talk I gave this example about this package called pad-left; completely hypothetical package... \[laughter\] And it might be transitively depended on by millions of different packages. And you personally n... |
Obviously, getting deleted is a really bad situation, but there are also other things, like security vulnerabilities, or maybe licensing issues, and other things along those lines that you think a lot about when you're thinking about your own package, but you should really think about it with all of your dependencies, ... |
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