Welcome to GoLang NZ

[Andrew Chilton]

Hi everyone and thanks for joining.

I'm just sending this now so we have a welcome email of sorts, but I
don't want to yet get involved in what we want from the first meeting.
I'll give it a few days so that everyone who wants to join has and
then we'll get the ball rolling.

To kick off though, how much experience have you had with Go so far,
just playing or full battlehardened systems? Finding this out means we
know where we stand at where to pitch the first meeting - also note
that whilst I've been messing around with Go for a short while, I'm no
expert so I'll be using this group as a learning exercise too.

Cheers,
Andy

--
Andrew Chilton
e: chi...@appsattic.com
w: http://www.appsattic.com/
p: +64 21 891 681

[Evan Shaw]

Hi all,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Andrew Chilton <chi...@appsattic.com> wrote:
> I'm just sending this now so we have a welcome email of sorts, but I
> don't want to yet get involved in what we want from the first meeting.
> I'll give it a few days so that everyone who wants to join has and
> then we'll get the ball rolling.
>
> To kick off though, how much experience have you had with Go so far,
> just playing or full battlehardened systems? Finding this out means we
> know where we stand at where to pitch the first meeting - also note
> that whilst I've been messing around with Go for a short while, I'm no
> expert so I'll be using this group as a learning exercise too.

I've been coding in Go in my spare time since it was publicly
released. I wrote the packages http/fcgi and smtp and have made other
contributions here and there. I wouldn't call any Go code I've written
battle-hardened, though. I have some (mostly experimental) projects on
my GitHub: http://github.com/edsrzf

I live in Auckland, so I won't ordinarily be able to attend Wellington
meetings. If anyone else is in Auckland and interested in starting a
group here, let me know. I will hang around this list regardless. ;)

- Evan

[Jonathan Wright]

My public go project is mcobj https://github.com/quag/mcobj, an exporter that converts Minecraft worlds into formats that can be easily read by many 3D rendering tools, including Blender. There's an active community for it up on http://reddit.com/r/mcobj that shares renders often.

Until recently I've been in Wellington, but I'm in Auckland now. I'm keen to be involved with a golang group here in Auckland.

Thanks,
Jonathan.

[Andrew Chilton]

Hi Evan and Quag (didn't realise you'd gone up to Auckland) and everyone else,

Sounds like you have at least two for an Auckland group so let us know
if you get together sometime. Anyone else in Auckland?

It also looks like both of you have done a fair bit more Go than I
have so I'm happy we have more experienced gophers in our mix.

My plaything recently has been just getting up and going with a
webserver, some requests, responses, redirects, cookies and using
bradfitz's memcache[1] client. I've also started hacking on goamz[2]
which is Gustavo's Amazon AWS client. He has S3 and EC2 there and I'll
probably add support for SimpleDB next (that's the plan for the
weekend anyway) with a view to doing Route53 and possibly others
later.

Cheers,
Andy

[1] https://github.com/bradfitz/gomemcache
[2] https://launchpad.net/goamz

[Nick Sarten]

I'm currently based in Palmerston North, but i'd definitely be keen to get myself down to Wellington at some stage for a get-together with other Go developers.

My work in Go to-date has mostly been little side projects that haven't really been useful to anyone in particular (yet). I've been chipping away at an OpenCL interface for Go (https://bitbucket.org/genbattle/go-opencl), but it really is a huge API, and i'm not sure of the best way to tackle it idiomatically in Go, so I've been taking it very slowly. I've also recently been working on EBML parsing for Go at work, with the goal of putting out an EBML parsing library for others to use, or maybe even getting the code integrated into the main Go library. 

I really just need some better project ideas at this stage, and some tutoring from other more experienced developers (i'm only in my second year out of University).

- Nick

[Tim McNamara]

Hi all, I'm a bit of a Go lurker. I'm pretty fascinated by the
language, but haven't written Go code yet. I'm trying to get a feel
for when I should write Go, rather than Python. Possibly fairly often.
The main thing I've been interested to know is the degree to which I
can build polyglot systems. Would love to be able to call Go from
Python with its very rich libraries.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Andrew Chilton <chi...@appsattic.com> wrote:

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[Daniel Smith]

Hey Andrew,

There's a few of us here @ Weta (www.wetafx.co.nz) who'd definitely be keen to come. 

We've got some relatively basic go code running in cron tasks and small utility commands like that out in production but we do have some much bigger stuff that we're working on at the moment all in Go.

Kudos for starting the group!

Cheers,

D

[Andrew Chilton]

Hi Daniel,

On 21 August 2011 12:24, Daniel Smith <kungfu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a few of us here @ Weta (www.wetafx.co.nz) who'd definitely be keen
> to come.

That's great news! :) Always happy to see that there is more than just
a few of us here having a play with it.

> We've got some relatively basic go code running in cron tasks and small
> utility commands like that out in production but we do have some much bigger
> stuff that we're working on at the moment all in Go.

Ooh excellent. It's always good to have people running things in
anger. I figure the first few months we'll all be learning off each
other and then learning more specific things as time goes on.

On a different note, I did 6 months at Weta in a dim and distant past
so it's quite interesting to hear how things are changing over there.
Let's face it, with that many machines communication and concurrency
are what it's all about and we all know that Go does both of these
things quite easily. :) Sounds like a perfect match.

> Kudos for starting the group!

Not a problem, in fact I'm really enjoying it and we haven't even had
our first meeting yet.

[Winston Kodogo]

I'm in Auckland. I'm not a user of Go in anger, but I've been a fan of the CSP approach to concurrency since way back, was always depressed that occam never took off in the way it deserved to, and would like to do something serious with Go, if only I could persuade my employer to let me.