Christopher Adigun on the GopherCon Iceland 2018

Our colleague Chris got the chance to attend the Grophercon 2018. What he has learned there, which workshops he has visited and what he thinks about Iceland, you will learn in his report.

Golang Iceland Trip

Alan Kay opines that “Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.”

Perhaps one of the greatest abilities of human existence is the ability to write code, in almost all spheres of life you can find that behind the systems that sustains are some lines of software code.

Golang is one of the fastest growing programming language, it is suited mostly for distributed systems and cloud native applications, it is built with the modern software engineer in mind, it powers most of the container orchestration softwares like Docker, Kubernetes, ETCD etc.

The Gophercon started with some workshops, I attended the Production-ready microservices with Go and Kubernetes session as I want to learn more about developing scalable microservices applications on Kubernetes. We started by writing a sample microservice application from scratch with the all the APIs, routers and tests, then we moved on to incorporating this with Helm for deployment on Kubernetes. After developing the respective Helm charts, we proceeded to deploying the whole application stack using CI/CD, the CI/CD system listens for the code commits on github and then initiates the creation of the helm chart values, building the image, pushing the image to Dockerhub and then finally creating the deployment on the kubernetes cluster.

The remaining days were mainly golang talks covering good practices and opinions. I personally enjoyed Kris Nova´s talk on creating custom operators for kubernetes, she went into details of how to create a sample Kubernetes operator using Golang. The kubernetes operator now has a framework that helps to really simplify this and the Redhat/Coreos team have been putting in lots of efforts in this regard.

I also had some talks with some Gophers from Europe and Africa, it seems the talent pool for professional Golang programmers is still growing, most of the people I talked with are using Golang mostly as a hobby, but the entire community is growing at an encouraging rate and Google has decided to put in more efforts in this regard.

Hopefully with the knowledge gained I will like to venture into writing custom kubernetes operators for the kubernauts community and also to extend some of the community projects by creating additional extensions to them like API endpoints and streamlining the deployment experience.

Iceland is cool country with surprisingly almost 24 hours of daylight, so my first night I had to really confirm that it was night time by checking up with google.

I will like to express my sincere thanks to the Kubernauts community for sponsoring the trip to Iceland.

All in all it was a wonderful experience, learning from some of the best Golang engineers, we will have to wait for the Golang team for the next location for the EU Gophercon and if it is Iceland then it will be another great opportunity to see the mountain peaks and grab some snacks at midnight.

 I quite agree with Hannah Kent:

 “In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And there's this strange thing: you're never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well.”

 Switch off briefly during the Gophercon