Things in Go I Never Use by Mat Ryer

Go has a lot of features that everybody learns when they are new to the language. After writing Go for over seven years (since r59 if you know what that is) I realised that there are a lot of those features that I never use, and don’t think you should worry about. This talk covers them and explains why. Drawing on a wealth of experience building real things in Go, this talk explores the theory vs the practice of Go, and aims to lighten the load of those learning the language. The more you know the better, but it’s better to learn things in the context of when you’re really trying to solve those problems, rather than all-at-once up-front with nothing real to pin it to. This talk will appeal to teachers of Go to prioritise the useful, so developers can be valuable sooner.

Mat Ryer has been programming since age 6 (Mat would type BASIC code out from computer magazines with his father to make little programs and games), Mat has always had a keen obsession with programming. An early adopter of Go pre-v1, Mat fell in love with the philosophy behind the language, and has been an active member of the Go community since.

Mat is the author of Go Programming Blueprints: Second Edition, and a regular speaker at conferences around the world. He is an avid believer in open-source technology and founded some popular packages and projects including Testify, Moq, BitBar and various Machine Learning tools.

In early 2018, Mat co-founded Machine Box to provide Machine Learning capabilities to developers of all levels.