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AbbyDeng/Abby at GopherCon 2023.md

Last active October 4, 2023 23:52
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Abby at GopherCon 2023
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Abby at GopherCon 2023.md

a few of us attended GopherCon 2023, i put down some notes that i shared with all the Datadogs

Talks

Googlers gave 5 talks, Redditers gave 2, we Datadog gave 1 (by Jon Bodner) all just great:

  • well structured, clear logic with a storyline, nice designed and delivered
  • some Googlers spent several months on talks, Redditers even had customized mascots
  • i guess they got tons of internal help, support, and resources on public speaking

what impressed me the most is what they covered about:

  1. why this problem ? often very simple but clear motivations and good talks managed to arrive at a "punchline" within 5-10 mins
  2. how to approach a problem ? it’s almost like you can see how they deduct from the very basic concepts, or a single quote in books or from other computer scientists as the fundamental philosophy to reach to more complex problems
  3. the willingness to diligently explore in the problem space — it’s like once that single problem + some philosophy to approach were chosen, they were used as a map to navigate a huge space (different languages, other companies, existing algorithms)
  4. the willingness to fully elaborate — after 1-3 the solution to a problem often becomes natural, but they still took time to walk through different examples and code snippets step by step, there were impressive amount of details
  5. ofc, they made you laugh from time to time :D

it happened that the week right before GopherCon, i attended Jason Fried’s talk in Vancouver + Computing Science 50th Anniversary at SFU (my Alma Mater) in which i met Prof. Graham Finlayson (who sold 2 companies to Apple), i saw common things mentioned above in their talks

at least 3 talks covered how to write better idiomatic Go code and it should be like telling a story with natural language

Side Notes

  1. i met Ross Cox + Robert Griesemer in person, they are very kind; being with them is just comfortable
  2. workshops are great, i recommend participating in them
  3. i fulfilled my dream of eating chips and twizzlers while listening to talks!! it’s just as how fun and chaotic i am, and i also gave other people and speakers twizzlers!! :D
Oct 2, 2023

Abby at Vancouver, Canada

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