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• Usefulness of referencing books and resources, even after extensive knowledge |
• Continual learning process when working with new libraries and features |
• Long-term research and writing process for creating a comprehensive book |
• Challenges in acquiring the skillset for writing about programming concepts |
• Emphasis on editing and self-judgment as key to improving writing quality |
• The importance of enjoying the writing process and considering the reader as a friend |
• Mastering a language or skill requires practice and hands-on experience, not just reading about it |
• Marketing can often be misleading and imply that mastery can be achieved quickly |
• True mastery comes from being able to approach problems with ease and think critically in the language |
• Recognizing when you need to refer to basic concepts or documentation is an important indicator of your level of expertise |
• A true master knows when not to use a tool and understands its limitations. |
• Community members such as Mat and Bill Kennedy have been helpful and written informative content |
• GopherCon is a large annual conference for the Go community that has gone online during the pandemic but will be in-person again this year |
• The community values kindness, niceness, and helpfulness, which should continue to grow with new additions |
• Mihalis Tsoukalos uses Python for time series and big data work, Java last year for a project, and is learning Rust and V programming language |
• Johnny Boursiquot has played around with Rust but needs to give it another try after some improvements have been made |
• Discussing the transition from Ruby to Elixir and other languages |
• Sharing experiences and approaches to learning new programming languages |
• Mihalis Tsoukalos' unpopular opinions: |
• Most meetings can be replaced by emails |
• C is the best programming language ever |
• Johnny Boursiquot's favorite programming language: Go |
• Discussion on adapting to the tool chosen for a project, rather than the best tool |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yes, yes, it is indeed Go Time. I will be your host today. I'm Johnny Boursiquot, and joining me is the author of the book "Mastering Go", Mr. Mihalis Tsoukalos. Hopefully, I've done your name justice... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Yes. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Awesome, awesome. So I became aware of your book - or rather the first edition of your book, maybe a year or two ago. And then it seemed like one of those very thick reference manuals. I was like, "Okay, this is one of those things you've gotta get on your shelves", like old-school, those giant t... |
Lo and behold, I never happened to do that, and then the publisher reaches out to me and says "Hey, would you like a review copy of this book? And I'm like "Sure, yeah. It's not like I don't have a dozen other things to do", but hey, I'm a sucker for reviewing Go books, and I was looking forward to this one as well... ... |
\[04:09\] But yeah, for those who don't know who you are, who you are on Twitter, the Twitter handle is @mactsouk, and you're a systems engineer and technical writer. So obviously, the writing is important. You're writing books, and everything. This is the third edition of your book. I wanted to start out with basicall... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Okay, so hello everyone, thanks for listening to us, and Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to come to your podcast. I'm a Unix passionate, I like Unix. I don't know why, but I like Unix, so you know... And systems stuff. I used to be an Oracle DBA, and I used to work with Cisco IOS... You know, ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, it used to be a rite of passage, you know? Set up your own mail server, and everything, your own DNS... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Yeah, SendMail with m4 configuration files, and those things. And working with versions of Unix other than Linux, like the IBM version AIX, or the Hewlett Packard version of Unix, HP-UX, and Solaris, my favorite one... So I'm a systems person, I like Unix, and I like writing software... So every ... |
So the idea was to find something that I can write systems software, but without having to worry about C stuff. That's how I started getting interested in Go. And when I learned that Rob Pike was involved - that was a big plus. |
So I started working more with Go, and learning Go more, and after some time I just wanted to write a book that I would like to read when I was learning Go. But the thing is that first I wrote a series of articles for Computer Magazine in the U.K. Ten, or maybe twelve, I don't remember... A series of articles that at t... |
And that's how I started getting involved with Go. You know, you can't trust a programming language too early, but you have to work with it, see how it goes, and see if you want to keep working with it. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, I definitely agree with that sentiment. The fact of the matter is when you say you want to write a book that you would have liked to learn Go with, the approach you took with the book - I definitely didn't think this was a beginner book. I think that's something that usually when I give ref... |
So then I was like, okay, great. That means when I start going through that book, I'm not going to see things like "This is what a conditional is." It'll just say "This is how Go does conditionals." Or things of that nature. |
\[07:56\] So when I went through the book, once I understood sort of the frame of reference that you were using to actually write the book, then the gripes I might have had with it, I started basically saying "Well, okay, so if Mihalis is making these assumptions about the reader, then this is the lens with which I hav... |
So that was the approach I took with the book... And for those who are looking to pick it up as well, that's what they should expect. That said, I kind of wanted to give you a chance to narrate a little bit on -- yes, this is a book you would have liked to have had, but you've been working with Go for a while; obviousl... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** It depends. Generally speaking, if you have some experience with programming, you should pick up Mastering Go very quickly, because you have to have some experience. If you have the experience, then you can work with it very easily... Because programmers know that the key point to learning someth... |
With Go -- I mean, one thing that surprised me with Go is that you didn't have the tilde, and fork, and things that you do in C. It took me a while to understand it, and understand that I have to work with goroutines instead. You have to practice to understand that, but in order to look for a fork, you have to know abo... |
Again, I think that the key point is practice. If you want to practice, then you will be okay. And the cool thing with the book is that even I use it as a reference sometimes, many times. Because you can't remember everything. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** God must give you some special kind of pride to be using your own book as a reference. |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Yes, yes, yes. This is a good point, not as a pride, but as a thing that you can -- you know, it is useful. It's not pride, because I have read many books, and I have used them as a reference as well. Many people have done that. But it's good to find it useful, because you cannot remember everyth... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Right, right. Yeah, Google-driven development is a thing... I partake in Google-driven development myself, so no shame in my game. Nobody can remember everything, and the nuance of everything. Every once in a while I'll still go to -- you know, my favorite resource in the Go community is gobyexam... |
\[12:00\] One of the things I constantly refer to is "How do I properly seed for randomization?" I always have to go look up "Okay, what's the package duran something?" These things, even though you use them frequently -- like, sometimes it's "Okay, what's the syntax? What is this type that I use all the time, that I n... |
So this is sort of a continuous journey of mastering Go, which is something I definitely wanna get into and talk about in a bit... Sort of at the philosophical level, what does it mean to master Go. But this is a 750-page book, so it's a chunky book. Lots of topics covered. What do you think was the most interesting pa... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** The Go garbage collector. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Ooh... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** I really enjoyed reading about that and learning about it, and then writing about that. I really enjoyed it. And I also enjoyed lots of external libraries like Viper, and Cobra, and \[unintelligible 00:13:06.02\] and Gorilla. Because they extend the language in a good way. Especially Cobra and Vi... |
I mean, that's the experience part. It's one thing to learn about something, but it's another thing to be able to choose based on facts. That's the difficult part. |
**Break:** \[13:43\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Speaking of the research and writing process, how long did the -- at least the first edition; I'm assuming with each edition you're not rewriting everything, you're just updating a few parts, some things that have changed, maybe some idioms have changed and whatnot... Roughly how long did it take... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Given the experience that I had with the articles, and another book that I have written for Packt is the Go Systems Programming, which helped a lot; it's one edition, it's the first book... It took me - and a lot of preparation though - six to eight months. But with a lot of preparation. You know... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[16:07\] So did you enjoy -- like, in my mind, having collaborated on book projects and things, in my mind there's the thing that I'm writing about, and then there's the writing about the thing that I'm writing about. Those are very different disciplines, very different skillsets. Writing about ... |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** For this skillset, the articles that I'm writing for Computer Magazine have helped me a lot, because for the article you have to present something, and you have a limited space. So you have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that helps a lot. So I'm trying to follow the same approach. ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[laughs\] I'd never heard of that one before. I'm gonna use that. |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** So when I'm editing, I'm trying to edit and be a hard judge for my own writing. And I think that helped me a lot with magazines, but also for the books. But have in mind that I have written some articles for magazine that I'm not very proud of. \[laughs\] It's not perfect, it's a process. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Right, right, right. |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** You don't begin perfect, it's a process. You learn, and you make mistakes, and then you make more mistakes, you correct something, and you try. We're not perfect, we're just -- you know, work in progress. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Don't expect to have something good, ready to ship the first time around, the first go-around, right? |
**Mihalis Tsoukalos:** Yeah. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** ...which sounds very much like the engineering process as well. You never quite get something right the first time. That's why we have even idioms around the act of writing software. You write a test, you get a failure, we make the test pass, and rinse and repeat. We often have mnemonics and thin... |
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