greetings gophers - AKL meetup, anybody?

[Am Laher]

Hi there,

Any other Auckland Gophers out there?

I'd be keen for an Auckland meetup sometime - anyone else? 

Show-and-tell: https://github.com/laher/goxc

Cheers

Am

[Evan Shaw]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:51 PM, Am Laher <a...@laher.net.nz> wrote:
> Any other Auckland Gophers out there?
> I'd be keen for an Auckland meetup sometime - anyone else?

I'd be in.

- Evan

[Am Laher]

Sweet as. Let's see how many people show an interest, and go from there. 

If it starts small, we could just meet up in a cafe or a bar to begin with.

Evan I see you work at iron.io. I enjoyed Travis's recent blog post about porting to Go: inspiring stuff.

[Nick Sarten]

I'd also be keen for a Go group.

[Eaden McKee]

I will tun up if I am in Auckland at the time :)

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Nick Sarten <gen.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd also be keen for a Go group.
>

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[Am Laher]

Well, 4 is a decent enough start - plenty enough for a good chinwag, and more will come out of the woodwork I reckon.

Not only that, but one of our number is writing the Manning Go in Action book - pretty amazing!

I've never set up anything like this before, so I'd like to gauge what you'd like to get out of a group.

Some options:

Option 1 (my preference): Just set a date for a casual meetup somewhere informal, like a quiet-ish cafe, bar or something - just to talk Go, make plans for the group, have a bite or a drink, and potentially crack open some laptops if it goes that way.

Ideally we'd have a proper venue - like a university room or someone's workplace - but it's not really necessary to start with.

Option 2: reach out to the Auckland GDG, to do a session under their umbrella. I'd be a little wary of orchestrating this myself, because they're mostly an Android group, and and as a Go hobbyist I wouldn't feel confident leading an 'Introduction to Go' talk at this stage. But on the other hand, they may be able to help move the group forwards more quickly.

Option 3: Set up our own meetup.com group first, volunteer session ideas through the meetup group, and then meet up we've formulated some concrete plans.

Option 4: I haven't thought of an option 4 yet. Ideas welcome.

I'm thinking it might be nice just to set a date in a few weeks time - maybe a weekday evening (e.g. Wed 24th April? too soon?), probably somewhere central, or just somewhere easy for everyone to get to. 

I'm a relative newcomer to AKL and pretty clueless when it comes to venues - suggestions would be helpful.

From there we could put the word out a bit further (e.g. Go+, go-nuts, and possibly other user groups who may have Gophers lurking, such as GDG, Python and Java usergroups).

Let me know what you think, and in the meantime we'll see who else pops out of the woodwork.

All the best

[Andrew Chilton]

On 27 March 2013 22:51, Am Laher <a...@laher.net.nz> wrote:
> Option 3: Set up our own meetup.com group first, volunteer session ideas
> through the meetup group, and then meet up we've formulated some concrete
> plans.

Feel free if anyone wants to either take over from me as owner and
moderator of this group, or indeed change entirely to meetup.com or
whatever you guys want. As some history, I did a fair bit of Go a
couple of years ago and loved it, but since then I've been in the
JavaScript and especially Node.js world and am not doing any Go at the
moment.

So anyway, hope you guys get your meetup in Auckland (I'd have come
along anyway, but am in Wgtn) and let me know. Else, I'll just keep
moderating people and their first messages to stop the spam. :)

Have fun!!! :D

Cheers,
Andy

--
Andrew Chilton
e: chi...@appsattic.com
w: http://appsattic.com/
t: https://twitter.com/andychilton
p: +64 21 891 681

[Nick Sarten]

Much like everyone else, my attendance is subject to my other commitments. I'll be out of town for about a month from the end of next week, and Tuesday nights are a no-go for me as I already have something on that night.

[Winston Kodogo]

OK, I'd be in. Although I'm an old man - well, I'm two years older than Rob Pike, a few years younger than Ken Thompson, and more of a 9fan than a goNut. But, seriously, what do people want to achieve out of a meeting? Is there any way that Go could become a serious development language in NZ? And if so, how? I would love to work on a project using Go. But, it seems to me, this is at present a pipe dream, unless someone listening is working for a company with a few clues.

Venues are easy to find if all involved can see some point in the meeting, and will guarantee to turn up, and honour their guarantee.  Pubs are probably the man, restaurants harder to organise, and with a higher penalty for not turning up.

Also, also, "We're all busy" is not a reason for committing to turning up and failing to do so.

So, I'm happy to turn up, even help in choosing a venue, but would be most seriously pissed off if people who had committed to turning up failed to do so.

That is all.

[Am Laher]

Winston, thanks for your offers and pertinent questions. I'll try to address everything.

Personally, I just hope to meet like-minded people to share Go skills, ideas and experiences with.

I am currently using Go for building a few command-line tools in my spare time, and I'm finding with Go that I'm more productive than with any other platform I've used before. All the standard libraries I've tried just seem to work really well for me, the platform offers a combination of features which I've always hoped for but never found before, and, most importantly, while developing in Go, things just seem come together very very quickly.

Go is at a very exciting time. It's such a young platform (almost exactly a year since 1.0), that there's plenty of opportunities to make meaningful contributions to the community at large. It's fun to be in such a green space.

So, I'd hope that we might find 2 or 3 Go experts out there, several Go novices (particularly polyglots interested in a new platform), and a few in between such as myself. I have always found I learn technologies more quickly while bouncing off other developers, whether more or less experienced than myself. For Go, I'm unlikely to find this type of interaction in my day job, so that's why I reached out here.

Regarding the nature of meetings, I would hope to be involved in a mixture of talks and hands-on coding sessions. I think the format would depend a lot on the size of the group and the levels of expertise within it.

* In an initial meeting, I'd hope to start with informal discussions - sharing of experiences, ideas, interests and aims.

* As the group gets a little larger, then 'lightning talks' are a great way to engage people. This could just be a regular 'slot' in most sessions. It seems to work well for the AKL Python meetup group.

* When possible, I'd hope to do some coding together, e.g. split into programming pairs, each pair attempting to solve the same problem, and subsequently share experiences with the group as a whole. This worked well in a recent Scala meetup.

* I think there will naturally be a training element - exploring syntax, constructs, standard library, tooling; getting to grips with 'idiomatic Go', anomalies, bugs, new features and so-on.

* Hopefully in time there would be enough expertise in the group for entire sessions to focus on a single talk. Maybe we could get talkers in from Oz or further afield. Hmm, OK that's a pipe dream.

* I'm sure some content on Plan 9 would be really interesting to hear. I imagine Go is somehow influenced by Plan9, and I know the compiler toolchain is strongly linked to Plan9, but that's all I know.

Venues: 

If you or anyone has suggestions for venues, I'd be happy to organise. Just offer up venue names, and we'll get there. No worries.

Beyond the initial couple of sessions I'd hope to secure 'proper' venues, i.e. somewhere quiet, preferably with Wifi. This may cost a little money, but maybe not. 

e.g.1 maybe someone's company or university would be open to hosting a session.

e.g.2 maybe someone like GDG could help with a venue. I'll contact them in due course.

e.g.3 I know that in London it's usually free to hire a pub function room (expectation being that you'll spend money at the bar) - not sure if that's also true here?

I have no idea whether Go will penetrate the NZ market, but I'm confident that it will gain acceptance globally, and it would be nice to think that it might gain some traction in niche areas, for instance as a systems or testing tool in other software shops (I'm a Java developer and in the past I've often used Python for server maintenance scripts & integration testing tools, whereas now I'd definitely prefer to use Go instead).

Finally Winston, please don't scare off the punters already! Don't you think it's a bit strong to talk about being 'seriously pissed off' before even discussing dates? I'd sooner try to encourage a more relaxed vibe, especially at this early stage. Certainly organisers and speakers should offer guarantees, but beyond that I'd just hope people feel free to come along as & when possible. I hope I haven't offended you, but it's important to me that any meetup I help organise would be a warm & fairly light-hearted experience, otherwise I'd sooner stay at home and talk to gophers online.

Hope that helps, thanks again & Happy Easter

Am

[Am Laher]

So, realistically I don't think we have enough interest to get going with a meetup yet.

Let's just hold fire until there's more interested parties.

I'm happy to keep raising the question every 3-6 months...

If anyone still wants to meet informally then let me know, otherwise let's touch base again later in the year.

Thanks for your replies, all the best

[Kees Varekamp]

Hi all,

So here I was thinking I am the only AKL Gopher but apparently I'm not :-)

I would love to organize a Go meetup - my company has an office where we can do presentations and hackathons and such. I can share my some of my experiences from building the Worlds First Commercial Go application - MROffice Dialer.

Best time would be probably late afternoon so people can come in after work - what about Friday 7 June at 5pm? We can organize takeaways.

Cheers,

Kees

[Evan Shaw]

I'd love to come, but you'll have to put me down as a "maybe". My wife
could be giving birth at any time (due June 8), so if it happens
before that day I'll probably have to skip.

- Evan

[Kees Varekamp]

If that happens just bring them along!

[Tim McNamara]

Might be worthwhile to have a few Google Hangouts to seed the community while numbers are pretty low.

Tim McNamara

@timClicks

[Am Laher]

I'm pretty sure I can come next Friday, either in a pub or online.

Cheers,

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[Kees Varekamp]

Great, that's 2.5 including myself - getting close to critical mass.

If we get another 3 I might even buy beer!

About the venue: I think we have 2 options:
- A pub somewhere downtown.
- Our office, which is in bustling New Lynn. A bit further out for some perhaps, but the advantages would be space, wifi, a projector, and parking.

[Eduardo Schettino]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Kees Varekamp <ke...@mroffice.org> wrote:

Great, that's 2.5 including myself - getting close to critical mass.

If we get another 3 I might even buy beer!

About the venue: I think we have 2 options:
- A pub somewhere downtown.
- Our office, which is in bustling New Lynn. A bit further out for some perhaps, but the advantages would be space, wifi, a projector, and parking.

Hi,

Although I am not using GO actively I would like to join in...

Maybe a good opportunity for me to kick-start a project :)
 

I would prefer a meeting downtown unless someone can give me a ride from CBD

cheers,

  Eduardo

[Am Laher]

I can do either. I live nearby Kees' office (Titirangi), but I'm happy to come into town too.

Thanks to Kees for the offer of the space - it'll be great to utilize it at some stage, even if it's not for the first session.

Cheers

p.s. Evan congrats in advance incase we don't see you next week

--

[Eduardo Schettino]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Kees Varekamp <ke...@mroffice.org> wrote:

Great, that's 2.5 including myself - getting close to critical mass.

If we get another 3 I might even buy beer!

About the venue: I think we have 2 options:
- A pub somewhere downtown.
- Our office, which is in bustling New Lynn. A bit further out for some perhaps, but the advantages would be space, wifi, a projector, and parking.

Hi Kees,

Any updates on this meeting? Is it really happening? Have you decided a venue?

I got a basic project, so I will have something to show off :D

cheers,

  Eduardo

[Kees Varekamp]

Let's meet up tomorrow at 5pm in Galbraith's Alehouse - on the corner of New North rd and mt Eden rd - I'll be there for sure.

Cheers,

Kees

[Eduardo Schettino]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Kees Varekamp <ke...@mroffice.org> wrote:

Let's meet up tomorrow at 5pm in Galbraith's Alehouse - on the corner of New North rd and mt Eden rd - I'll be there for sure.

cool. I will also be there for sure.

cheers

[Am Laher]

Cool, I'll see you there.
Robert from 'AkJS' today says he'll hopefully come along aswell.
Cheers

--

[Evan Shaw]

My wife gave birth yesterday morning, which is amazing, but means that
I'll have to miss this one. Sorry, guys.

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[Kees Varekamp]

Awesome!

Enjoy!

[Am Laher]

Congrats Evan.
I'm here guys - tallish with blue hoody :)

[Robert King]

Good to see you guys. Let me know when the next one is. Cheers.

On Monday, 25 March 2013 20:51:50 UTC+13, Am Laher wrote:

Hi there,

Any other Auckland Gophers out there?

I'd be keen for an Auckland meetup sometime - anyone else? 

Show-and-tell: https://github.com/laher/goxc

Cheers

Am

[Am Laher]

Agreed, that was great thanks guys. I hope Kees & Eduardo stayed talking for a while longer.

Here are the 4 hobby projects I've done in go. The first one seems to be a popular project, and the rest are mainly just experiments really:

https://github.com/laher/goxc - a cross-compiler and packager thing.

https://github.com/laher/gopin - it's like 'go get' but you can specify a version number (i.e. a branch or tag).

https://github.com/laher/nettis - nettis is like an echo server (or client) for tcp, tcp+ssl/tls, and http(s). You can configure it to 'echo' a request back, or give it some stock responses. this one uses goroutines a little bit. I really enjoyed the SSL/TLS implementation for this. Generating self-signed certificates on the fly was really easy, which made me happy.

https://github.com/laher/mkdo - a little command-line tool for when you've forgotten to make a folder. Just an experiment, but I use it quite a lot

Cheers

--

[Am Laher]

By the way, when I was talking about the infamous 'api' (i.e. the nice HTTP+JSON api), the part about it I enjoyed was that I could call the API using Go's standard libraries.

Roughly speaking, the significant calls were:

1. requestData, err := json.Marshal(req)

2. http.NewRequest("POST",apihost+"/content/"+subject+"/"+repository+"/"+pkg+"/"+version+"/publish",...)

3. req.SetBasicAuth(subject, apikey)

4. body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)

5. err = json.Unmarshal(body, &b)

So, it felt good to do this in Go without needing any 3rd party libraries.

Here's the relevant source file incase you're interested: https://github.com/laher/goxc/blob/master/tasks/bintray.go

Cheers,

[Kees Varekamp]

Ahh - beautiful. I feel a serene cloud of restfulness descending on me ;-)

[Am Laher]

lol, I asked for that ;)