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• Introduction of Ole Bulbuk and his experience as a backend engineer since the 1990s |
• Discussion of the Berlin Go community and its growth |
• Comparison between Java and Go, with Ole preferring Go's simplicity and ease of use |
• Ole's introduction to Go in 2009-2010 and his initial hesitation due to uncertainty about its market potential |
• The transition from Java to Go for low-latency services and cloud tech |
• Description of the Berlin techie ecosystem in the 1990s, with a mix of Java, C#, and other languages |
• Java's complexity led to frustration with language and its frameworks |
• Ole Bulbuk lived in Berlin from 2008-2015 and saw a shift towards PHP and startups |
• Ruby was also widely used among non-technical startups |
• Go started gaining popularity around the early 2010s, with some early adopters in Berlin |
• The Berlin tech ecosystem matured over the last decade, with increased adoption of Go beyond traditional startup community |
• Internationality of Berlin's tech scene is attributed to immigration and lack of local talent for certain industries |
• Language diversity and internationalization are linked but not directly causative |
• German work contracts have a probation period of 6 months during which both employer and employee can terminate with short notice |
• After probation period, terminating an employment becomes more difficult and requires a process involving addressing performance issues and providing resources to the employee |
• Go developers in Berlin tend to be international, multilingual, and from diverse backgrounds, often switching from other languages like Java or Ruby |
• Some startups are adopting Rust, but its use is limited due to its complexity and difficulty of adoption for large-scale projects |
• The Berlin tech ecosystem reflects a shift towards web APIs and more use of Go by enterprises, which tend to be risk-averse and less visible in the community |
• Large enterprises have different work cultures, being more focused on efficiency and scale, with less emphasis on sharing their experiences or showcasing their work |
• The speaker's experience with scaling in enterprise environments |
• How Ole Bulbuk discovered the Go meetup in Berlin and joined the community |
• Changes in the type of talks at the Go meetup over time (from technical to practical) |
• Factors contributing to a potential slowdown in adoption of Go in Berlin |
• Google I/O mentioning Go for the first time since 2015, indicating increased recognition of the language |
• Discussion about the impact of Google I/O featuring Go talks on user growth and adoption |
• The Berlin ecosystem's influence on the growth of the Go community and vice versa |
• Ease of relocation to Berlin for developers, including visa requirements and benefits |
• Comparison between in-person and virtual meetups, with Zoom fatigue and decreased attendance being discussed |
• Future plans for returning to in-person meetups and potential changes in attendee behavior |
• Unpopular opinions on the Go programming language, focusing on the impact of audience perception on opinion popularity |
• Over-engineering as a problem in the real world |
• Discrepancy between university-problem solving and real-world problems |
• Inadequate preparation of university graduates for practical programming tasks |
• Importance of learning to read other people's code and make trade-offs for business value |
• Difficulty transitioning from doing things "the right way" to doing things efficiently in a business context |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So welcome, everyone. It's great of you to join us through this episode about the Berlin ecosystem and how the slowly transition to Go has happened. And I am joined by my co-organizer, Ole. Hi, Ole! |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Hi! Nice to meet you. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** How are you doing? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, I'm fine, thanks. Nice to meet you. Great honor to be on the show. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, we've been zooming for two years now... Once the meetup is gonna go back to in-person, it's just gonna be weird, at some point. Just as it was weird transitioning to Zoom, it's gonna be weird transitioning, but we'll manage. |
So Ole, you are a backend engineer since the '90s. That's your fun catchphrase. And you've been working in different companies that are big and small, and you've had lots of projects that you saw fail and succeed. And you love being part of the Go community, and you're working for Ardan Labs... And hey, you're my co-or... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** 2017, I think. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. And you are writing open source software in Go. But also maybe not. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Nowadays in Go. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[03:56\] Yeah. So backend engineer since the '90s... Before we dive into what does that mean, for those of you who listen and don't know, Ole and I are co-organizing the Go user group, together with Tim who is not joining us today... And we've been meeting in-person for a while, and then we've... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I'm very happy over that, and to be part of it, of course. I think in Germany at least it seems to be by far the biggest and most active, so I'm very happy with that. I can assure you, when you live in Berlin, you can find enough companies probably for the rest of your developer life, only working on Go... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I definitely can say the same. I would agree with this. Okay, so back to the original catchphrase of your introduction... You've been a backend developer since the '90s... So you were the OG hipster in Berlin. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, in the '90s I've been working with Java, and we built our own frameworks for backend stuff... And I had \[unintelligible 00:05:42.23\] in between, and this remote method invocation, or something... It was a bit like this Cobol thing, and... Yeah, most people don't remember, probably. And we were b... |
Nowadays you have a bit more of standards, and libraries and so on, and you're not supposed to build everything yourself. But in the old days this could be a lot of fun... But yeah, when you had someone who had fun with it, but didn't know the requirements, it could go really bad, too. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I guess Go has also not that many frameworks, but... Also I guess less just common to use one. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah. And one thing I love about Go also is that if feels like the old times of Java, where I could say, "Oh, this is just Java code, and I can dive into it and understand it quickly", and this works pretty well with Go, too. Often, the common libraries aren't \[unintelligible 00:07:10.13\] with lots of... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. So after Java, what was the language or languages that you were using? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Well, I got fed up with Java a bit, and then I tried Python for a while... And Python the language I don't mind too much, but back then it was all compared to Ruby and PHP, and \[unintelligible 00:07:50.20\] job at an agency, and this was really tough and not relaxed working there... And especially when... |
\[08:12\] Then I went back to Java, because I thought, "Well, the language might be nicer", but you know, the working conditions were not... And then I just went back to Java, and then I found Go later. It started a little bit when it first came out, 2009, 2010, or something; I started using it a little bit for a small... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Wait, so how did you hear about it? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Oh, just in the news somewhere. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It was not the German news, probably. I think by the first time Go was mentioned in the German news was like 2017. \[laughs\] I'm kidding. Definitely not around release time. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, yeah... So it was way before 1.0 at least, and it never caught up to 1.0. I stopped it. But it was a nice experience, and I just didn't know where it would go, and whether there would be a true market for it. And then I said "Okay, maybe I should keep with Java a bit longer." |
I kept with that, and then in 2015-2016 I joined the Berlin user group, and understood that Go does have a market that Java couldn't reach. Actually, the lower latency services, and so on, like for advertisement bidding, and cloud tech and so on, where you need low latency - this can sometimes work with Java, but when ... |
So I started to see that there is really something to it that makes total sense, and I got more and more into it, and was happy to get a full-time job when I got a chance. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Would you say that the ecosystem, the techie ecosystem of Berlin in the '90s was mostly Java? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I think no. I've been a few times told that it would be easier to get a job if I would be a C\# developer instead. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** C\#... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah... So the standard competition back in those days. When you wanted to do business software, it was either Java or C\#. Companies like Siemens - they said "Yeah, we have the odd Java projects somewhere, but we would really rather use C\#, if you wouldn't mind." And then I'm like "Yeah, maybe I'm not... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And how did you see the languages change as the ecosystem was developing, and specifically in Berlin? What languages, what tech stacks did you see over the years through the '90s, through the 2000s, through the 2010s? Give us a travel down the history lane. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** As I said, it started in the wild, old days where you would develop your own framework for everything. Every new project you started with a clean sheet, and then first thought what would be great to have, and then started building that. And later you had in the Java world also all these frameworks. Some... |
\[12:10\] Then these annotations in Java, that are really nice to write, but very hard to debug, because there's some code executed that you'd never seen, and you can't reach it anyhow with a normal debugger; the annotation itself doesn't even point to the real code. That is just looking for the annotation, and then do... |
So I was more and more fed up with it, and I thought maybe the language - there's still some good color to it, and I tried to make people happy and adopt that a bit more. Then I realized that the community really loves these frameworks, and that you can do powerful things in three lines. |
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