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**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah, that's why I need Ed, and Miguel, and all those guys. But I also didn't do it for it sit on a shelf... So if you want material that I have, all you ever have to do is reach out and we'll figure it out. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's great. |
**Bill Kennedy:** So I think that stuff is really good. And then what else is there? The books, video... And then I guess googling everything. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. What's the big challenge educating? What's the thing that people struggle with the most, in your experience, when they're learning Go? |
**Bill Kennedy:** I break up my training in two parts. I call it a micro-level understanding and a macro-level understanding. So the micro-level understanding is when we get down to lines of code. That's the readability, the simplicity, the syntax, the idioms. And you need that. If you really wanna engineer -- there's ... |
So at a micro-level, it's critically important to have those idioms and understand what it means for something to be readable. And then learn how to refactor for simplicity. But after a week of Ultimate Go, I don't think you have the ability to go back and be as productive as you could. It's not necessarily a practical... |
**Mat Ryer:** Right. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Now we're gonna talk about architecture, now we're gonna talk about project structure. Now we're gonna talk about macro-level idioms, and practical things like building and logging and configuration. And I don't wanna have to have the micro-level conversation when I'm doing that. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Bill Kennedy:** But I think you need both. So the hardest thing is if I get somebody in my macro-level class, that hasn't taken my micro-level class, I have to fight to not take tangents, and just say "You know what - I'll get you the video. Let's do that." And on the micro-level class, I have to remind myself that -... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Bill Kennedy:** I don't think people understand how much they get out of the micro-level class until their product's in production, and now they start hitting the tooling a little bit, and now all the little things I said... Because I've gotten that fever. You know, data class and then we started having problems in p... |
So I think as a teacher there, it's -- I don't know, I'm always fighting to make sure I'm giving the person what they need... And the struggles are just different. Everybody's struggling with different... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. But can people learn -- I feel like you'd be able to learn the macro stuff. You have to sort of be okay with not having the complete picture down to that detail, but you can still learn concepts, and retrofit that. Or do you find that you do need that foundation to build on? Is it more that way arou... |
**Bill Kennedy:** \[37:56\] I think with Go we've already learned that within three weeks you can build just about anything you want, and it will run, and it will run pretty dang good. And if you wanna leave it like that, you can. We've learned that already. So what comes down to you is what level engineer do you wanna... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, sometimes that's appropriate. Like, if you just have to solve a problem that just you have right now, you wanna process these files and change them, or... And that's great. |
**Bill Kennedy:** That's it. And it's fair. And you're the only one who's gonna worry about this... It's totally fair. We got it to -- remember back in the day when the community got crazy, like if you weren't writing idiomatic Go, you were evil? |
**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] |
**Bill Kennedy:** Like, what the hell, guys? So I'm glad I don't see that as much as we were in the beginning, where maybe there were more academics than there were people just saying "Tell me what to do." |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah... |
**Bill Kennedy:** So I think that's fair. But if you wanna be a better engineer, and really think about readability, and maintainability, then -- |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. You've got a big team, or multiple teams working on a codebase that's gonna have a long life, then it's a different game. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah. And you don't wanna know... On all of my teams, when I start a new project, I tell everybody "I don't wanna know who wrote any line of code when I'm looking at it. If I know who wrote this, we've got a problem." |
**Mat Ryer:** That's interesting, yeah. That's funny, because with `go fmt` and the fact that there isn't lots of different ways to do things in Go - there tends not to be - you do get sometimes this effect where you look at some code and it feels like you've written it. And that's such a -- |
**Bill Kennedy:** It is. But let's talk about where that can go wrong. Variable declarations. |
**Mat Ryer:** Okay, yeah. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Right? So I'm teaching all the time, var for zero value construction. I don't wanna see short variable declaration operators, I don't wanna see empty literals unless we're on returns, right? So there I can pick out that "This is it." |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Because there's multiple ways to do it, that's why... Isn't it? |
**Bill Kennedy:** To me, it was a necessary war to keep the compiler simple, but there's a war there. It's one of the first things I teach in the micro - I don't care what you do here, but have a plan. |
The other thing is I hate the else clause. I hate it. Use a switch. Use the naked switch. It's much more readable. So the moment I see an else clause in a piece of code, I freeze, actually. It's horrible. I get stressed out... Like, "This has gotta go." |
**Mat Ryer:** Have you ever considered making like a Bill linter, where you put your opinions into this tooling? |
**Bill Kennedy:** No, because the static check linter is really good, and everybody should be supporting Dominic on that project. We do at Ardan with the GitHub contributions. |
**Mat Ryer:** Ah yeah, sponsors. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah. Everybody who's using that tool should be giving them something every month, because what he's doing is amazing. Now, I did start writing what we were calling the Ardan Playbook... |
**Mat Ryer:** Okay, yeah... |
**Bill Kennedy:** ...which was all of this -- and I got about ten pages in, and it was so tedious to write... |
**Mat Ryer:** Why? |
**Bill Kennedy:** Because this wasn't kind of conversational things that I did. This was literally-- |
**Mat Ryer:** Complaining. \[laughs\] |
**Bill Kennedy:** Not even complaining. It was just very dry. It was "Do this, and not this. Then this, and not this", and after about like a day, my brain just started to shut down, and I couldn't -- and I have a little bit of it out there, but... I did put a lot of it in the Ultimate Go Notebook, but it's not like fo... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I did a talk at Gotham Go in New York City called "Things in Go I don't use", or "Things in Go I never use", or something. Else is one of them, and I make that same point, of like -- you know, you sort of hide the happy path in this indentation, and things like this... |
\[42:02\] So yeah, I agree. Anything we can do... It's really thinking about the usability, the user experience of your code. Because that's why you get away with a lot when you're the only one that's going to be working on it. As soon as you've got more people that are gonna be maintaining this code, then you've gotta... |
**Bill Kennedy:** But it's bigger than that... Because look, here's the reality - I've been in this industry for 30-something years. To date, that I know of, I've got three projects still in production. One that's over 20 years old, one that's over 10 years old, and one that's a couple of years old. So what I don't wan... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Bill Kennedy:** So if you're not writing code for the next person... If the code you're writing, you're not thinking about the next person, two things happen when you leave - either the next person says "This is shit, and we're throwing it away and rewriting it", which could also now mean it ain't in Go anymore... Ri... |
**Mat Ryer:** True. |
**Bill Kennedy:** Or the other thing that's gonna happen is it just gets completely abandoned... And now it's almost like it never existed. So what keeps you up at night - finishing in this industry and not having anything to show for it. This isn't like we're building a house that's gonna be here a thousand years from... |
**Mat Ryer:** That's true, that's true. It can be so transient, can't it? |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah. So for me, that's like the nightmare situation. How many late nights did you have at the office at a previous job because you had to finish this code? And guess what \[unintelligible 00:43:54.02\] today? You realize how insignificant that was, because it's not even running anymore, and you ruine... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, absolutely. I've experienced that. And I have to remember it when I'm now working late to do this. It is worth remembering, in a few years this won't be important. I do have to keep -- I completely agree. But with education people though, a legacy - that's a multiplier of what contribution you're ma... |
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