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**Ole Bulbuk:** \[28:12\] Yeah, I think there are different companies. Some were just built up on Go, like these advertisement \[unintelligible 00:28:18.14\] who saw that this is the language they need to be able to develop quickly and efficiently, and also have the short latency that they need to be able to compete. |
Then other companies like the fintechs, who wanted to do banking, but in \[unintelligible 00:28:39.02\] so they used Go. So they started all with Go. |
And then there are bigger companies that often are a bit more polyglot, and then sometimes they have a Go project and sometimes they use Java, or Kotlin, or whatever else. And yeah, I think these two types I see quite a lot, and some in between, of course, that still have something old running somewhere, or are trying ... |
I don't think this is bad. I can imagine starting something with Ruby or so, getting something up and running quickly, and when you see that the smallest instance of some virtual machine on Amazon or so doesn't work out anymore, and you have to scale, then it's maybe a good time to switch to Go, because you seem to hav... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. With adoption of Go by enterprises that happened in the recent few years - how do you see this reflect in the Berlin tech ecosystem? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I see that we even more use web APIs. It's even more important than before. And otherwise, they aren't so visible, usually. They don't do lots of talks, they are often more consumers than producers... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Of content? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, of content, and... Also, I remember when I've been at these companies myself, or worked for them while working for a consulting company, there wasn't this culture of producing something and showing it around so much. You sometimes showed something, but this was a big thing, and you would think abo... |
And I think it's also got to do with this mentality that there are more risk-averse people attracted by those companies, so they don't like to expose themselves so much. And this is probably the reason why we don't see them so much. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** As speakers in the meetup, yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** \[31:48\] Yeah. Sometimes you see someone, especially when it's a bigger conference or something, or you've got someone who got paid for it, or so... But we usually do it preparing something in our spare time, and then going somewhere, wherever people would be willing to listen to us... \[laughs\] This ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. And startups is kind of different, right? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah. Startups is just doing a guess, trying it out, and then see what feedback comes back. And then adopt, and do again. The same you can do with interacting with other people, with presentations, with giving talks, or going to a podcast, or whatever. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. It is interesting to hear what large enterprises are doing, and it is harder to reach, but they definitely can tell different stories, especially about the scale. So if any enterprise gophers are listening, please give a talk. We want to hear your talk at our meetup, or any local meetup t... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, definitely. I've seen some applications, and scale wasn't such a big topic there. So it's not like the traditional -- or Google scale, like thousands of requests, or millions of requests per second, or something like that. But I've seen more as a scale problem in enterprises was that you had to sc... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So the Go meetup - how did you hear about that, and when? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Oh, I think this was when I tried or was thinking about moving back to Berlin, and I wanted to dive into the tech scene deeper, and find out how it is, and what it looks like. Then I was just searching for meetups in Berlin, and found a few, and then the Go meetup was one of them. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So you were searching for technical meetups in general, not specifically the Go one. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Exactly. When I first went to Berlin back, I've been starting a Java job here. And this company has later switched to Ruby. And I started doing the switch with the company, but I realized for becoming as good in Ruby as I've been in the Java world before, I would need like ten years or something, since ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And can you compare the Go meetup, how it was when you started coming, versus how it is these days? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Oh, I think it is a bit different. Back in the days it was way more technical, and every talk was technical, kind of, I think. At least those that I remember... \[laughs\] And you had always some people talking about what they have done, or were planning to change on the Go compiler itself, or the toolc... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Mm-hm. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** \[36:07\] And it's still doable, and it's possible, but it's not that common anymore. I think the community has changed also; you have a harder time to find those die-hard techies nowadays. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So how would you describe the talks these days? |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, these days still we have of course quite some technical talks, but they don't dive as deeply, and don't talk half the time about a few microseconds that have been saved somewhere, usually... |
We still do have interesting technical talks, definitely, but it's not all about it. We see that there are a lot of other challenges in real life, and for many projects Go is just quick and everything enough. They never optimize something for years or so. They never see a reason to optimize a single bit about their Go ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I would probably describe this somewhat similarly. The first talks were about Go, and kind of on the language itself, and the more recent ones are things I do with Go at work, things I do with Go for my fun... But yeah, it's a good distinction, the difference between in Go and with Go. I wonder... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I think this changed a little too, but yeah... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It probably has something to do with the fact that in the beginning, or years ago, the language was more like a hipster thing to try for fun, and people who were doing that and coming to talk about that were doing this because they want to, and now there's more and more people who are gophers b... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah. What do you think is the biggest hurdle of more adoption of Go in Berlin? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I'm trying to think of an answer that does not have the word "hockey stick" in it... \[laughter\] So there's this graph, like a Gaussian, ghost-looking graph of a language, of adoption; in the beginning it's just very few, then there is a huge peak that many people are adopting, and then there ... |
In the beginning it was more word of mouth, and reading, like you said, on the news, and so on... And now it's more - yeah, because you have to, because that's your job. And companies will keep adopting Go, but probably because we have kind of behind us, or right now, as fast as it gets is just not gonna be this fast a... |
\[39:47\] This last week, or this week was Google I/O, and this is kind of the conference that Google organizes for people who are community organizers, like us, and who are developers, and for people who participate in their different programs... And Go was mentioned. And before this year, it happened once, sometime I... |
I asked you earlier how did you join the Go community... So the way that I joined the Go community is when sometimes after I moved to Berlin I just went to a conference; I don't even remember how I heard about that anymore... But it was the DevFest, which is the annual conference of the different Google developer group... |
At that time I was working at a company that was using Go, and then I overheard in the hallway a conversation, something about Go, and I joined that conversation, and then somebody said "Oh, you should join our user group." And this was a person \[unintelligible 00:41:19.21\] who at the time was the organizer of the us... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Cool. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** That was end of 2013, early 2014, I think. A long time ago. And yeah, so the Go meetup was almost three at the time, so that was already nicely going on... In English, which is definitely fun. It felt inclusive in that sense, that you don't need to be a German speaker to be able to participate. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, great. Back to this topic of adoption of Go, nowadays I think we will have -- as you said, the adoption curve will flatten a bit, but I also think the new members and people joining in the meetup will probably flatten a bit more, because the big companies \[unintelligible 00:42:27.04\] who use Go ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, I definitely hope that this signal of including a talk about Go in Google I/O would be a nice push towards that end of that curve, that would bring those people on board. And I definitely hope that this will also mean more talks for our meetups. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** Yeah, that would be nice, of course. But it would be very welcome if we'd get a new wave of talks from companies we've never heard of so far that they would be using Go at all. Yeah, it would be really fun. |
**Break:** \[43:36\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Do you think there's any connection between how the Berlin ecosystem is having lots of gophers, and then lots of companies with Go, and how the Go user group is very early on? So did one influence the other? If yes, which did which? If not, what is that connection between the ecosystem and the ... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I think it's always intertwined a bit. We have luckily these early adopter companies, then with some good Go developers, and then this greater Go community... And then there were these companies where people said "Well, we do have enough developers here in Berlin. We can bet on Go." And then they could ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. |
**Ole Bulbuk:** I think when you show to a manager "Hey, Go is optimal for this kind of system that you want to build", then he says "Well, but I asked my developers that I can get and I have already here, and they don't know much about Go." So it's hard to get them to try it. This is, I think, still the limiting facto... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, that's definitely that, and this will definitely make a difference, because it's more happening in larger companies, and larger -- of course, it's harder to convert, but it will bring more... To convert one large company, you have to have a lot of developers joining. |
You mentioned relocating to Berlin for Go... So for those who are not familiar with working in Europe generally as a developer, and specifically in Berlin, in Germany, there are very easy visas that your employer can issue for you. So it's a lot easier than a Green Card. You kind of need a recognized degree from univer... |
**Ole Bulbuk:** \[50:04\] I think the contract that you get from the company is the most important thing. Then with that you can get the rest rolling somehow. Especially from within the EU or something like that, it's quite easy. And when you are from outside, it's getting a bit more difficult, but... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, for those who are inside the EU, you don't need to do anything; you just move here and start working. But for those who want to come from abroad, the visa - it's called the Blue Card; it's rather straightforward. There's no quotas on that to start with. It does simplify things. |
And as anything in the world in the last two years, our meetup as well switched from in-person to virtual. Can you share your insights on that? |
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