The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - GopherCon 2015 (Interview)

Episode Date: May 19, 2015

Brian Ketelsen and Erik St. Martin, the organizers of GopherCon, joined the show to talk about what it takes to create and run a conference like GopherCon, the size of the event, the speaking track, after-parties, hack day, workshops, and more. We also covered their focus on diversity with their Diversity Scholarship Support Fund that anyone can support, even those who don't plan to attend, as well as their child care options to ensure even those with children have the opportunity to attend.

Welcome back everyone. This is The Change Log and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 158 and on today's show we have Eric St. Martin and Brian Kettleson joining us. They are the organizers behind GopherCon and if you didn't know the changelog was going on the road we're taking changelog films to denver to cover gopher con so if you see us there cameras in hand make sure you say hello we're going to be there saying hi to everybody we can july 7th through 10th and we talked to eric and brian today about everything we could about gopher con what it takes to create an event like this the size the days the after parties the hack day the workshops and even their diversity program eric

and brian care so much about the go community they created a diversity scholarship support fund as part of gopher con so even if you're not going to the event you can support this scholarship fund to ensure diversity in the go ecosystem we're also shooting season three of beyond code at gopher con so if you'd like to participate check the show notes for details this episode is sponsored by code chip code chip is a hosted continuous delivery service focusing on speed security and customizability you can set up continuous integration in a matter of seconds and automatically deploy when your tests have passed code chip supports your github and your bitbucket projects you can get started with code chips free plan today and should you decide to go with a premium plan you can save 20 off any plan you

choose for three months by using our code, TheChangeLogPodcast. Again, that code is TheChangeLogPodcast. Head to CodeShip.com slash TheChangeLog to get started. And now, on to the show. All right, we got Eric St. Martin and Brian Kettleson joining us today. The organizers behind GopherCon. If you don't know, the change log is going to be at GopherCon. We're working with Brian and Eric to film all sorts of stuff about GopherCon this year.

So if you see us, we'll likely be carrying cameras. But say hello. We want to say hi to everybody we can. But Eric, Brian, how are you? Welcome to the show i'm doing great happy to be on yeah thanks we also got jared online as well and you know i know that i'm speaking for jared when i say this but we've been really excited about go yep talking about gopher con today we've had several shows on go we cover go pretty much every week in change all

weekly but jared how excited are you personally about Go4Con this year? I'm excited for two reasons. First of all, I have dabbled in Go, so I'm excited to learn a little bit more. I do have one production Go application, which is more than zero, but not very many. And secondly, because I love me some Denver, and I'm excited about that. That's the funny thing is that Eric and Brian, neither of them are from Denver. Are you guys? I'm originally from Wyoming and everybody who grows up in Wyoming ends up in Denver if they want a tech job. So after, let's say I moved to Florida, I don't know, 10 years ago.

And when we were looking to do a conference, we wanted someplace that was kind of neutral because San Francisco is kind of not neutral in terms of corporate territory. So we thought Denver might be a really neutral place to have a conference that is not a Google conference. This is a Go conference. And, you know, we wanted that neutral territory. So I picked Denver just because I wanted to go back home and see the mountains. Just for separation of voices. Who was that? That was Brian.

And I think that Denver is really an upcoming tech hub too. There's a lot more places popping up there. And we had a lot of offers for feet on the ground to help by the local meetup group there as well. Deal. Let's get some instructions out of the way. Let's figure out who you guys are. We'll dive deep into go. We don't have a ton of time cause we've got a hard stop on one of our sides.

So we're going to try and blaze through this in 35 minutes just for listeners sake to know what we're working with here. But, uh, let's start with Eric. Eric, who are you? And, uh, and how did you get started with gopher con? So my name is Eric St. Martin. So Brian and I actually worked together at the time, and we were doing Go. And we kept talking about it for probably, what, Brian, like a year and a half, two years. Easily, yeah. We were begging for a Go conference.

We really wanted one. And Brian, through some Twitter conversations, basically got dared to do it. And he's like, let's organize one. And the rest is history. What about you, Brian? So I've been doing Go since 2010, early 2010, and wanted there to be a Go conference for a long time. Like Eric said, we've been chatting about how nice it would be to be able to go to a Go conference. And at some point, I guess it was about 2012, we said, all right, this needs to happen.

One of our Twitter friends said, well, then do it. Why sit around complaining about it? Just make it happen. All right, this needs to happen. One of our Twitter friends said, well, then do it. Why sit around complaining about it? Just make it happen. All right, fine. So I think it was probably midnight. I registered gophercon.com and sent Derek an email and said, we're doing a Gopher conference. Suck it up. Suck it up.

Yep. And of course, he was in full bore. So that's our origination story, our founding story. Where was the first one at? The first one was in Denver. Okay. And we had no idea what we were doing. Probably still don't, to be fair.

But, you know, we'd never run a conference before. We just wanted to have a place to build a community for Go people to come together. Now, previously, we had already created Gopher Academy, which is an organization, a website, whose sole purpose is really just to promote Go. We wanted there to be almost like the Ruby Central kind of foundation that promotes Go without any sort of corporate sponsorship, any corporate allegiance or alliances. And I thought it was important early on for there to be that sort of foundation for Go so that people could see it as something bigger than Google. And so we already had the Gopher Academy foundation to move on when we built GopherCon. So it was a little easier for us.

We already had a corporation that we could use to create GopherCon. We already had some web properties and such. That's an LLC, not when you say foundation, you mean foundation as in like not real foundation, like 5123 Foundation? No, it is not a nonprofit organization. It is sort of a not-for-profit LLC. We certainly aren't making any money off of it, but haven't gone through the trouble yet of turning it into a true IRS-type nonprofit organization. And really that comes with a lot of additional overhead and work, which, you know, obviously gopher Academy and gopher con aren't Brian and I's full-time jobs.

It's stuff that we do on the side. So anything that causes additional overhead hurts. So Jared, for you, was this, was gopher con last year on your radar? No, no, it wasn't at all, which is strange considering it's not too far away from me, and I'm on the periphery of the Go ecosystem. But was that the first one, guys, or was that the second one? That was. Last year was the first one.

That was the first one. All right. And when you guys took the dive, when you took the dive, did you know what all goes into throwing a conference, or was it an ignorance is bliss type of a situation? It was definitely an ignorance is bliss. Like this will be easy. No big deal, right? Yeah, it was really astonishing how much stuff came up and how much you learn about the whole event industry and all the things you didn't know, the contracts and complexities and how much stuff costs. It was definitely an eye-opener.

But yeah, last year was our first, and I think it didn't register on a lot of people's radar because it was relatively unknown. A lot of even companies came to us afterwards and didn't realize that it had happened already. So, Brian, we've got to say a big shout-out to you because we, well, I guess you and Jared technically, because, Jared, you opened up an issue on our ping repo, which people are familiar with.

So listeners of the show, we have a ping repo on GitHub that we use to sort of take in notice from the community. It's sort of our open repo where you can create issues and help us learn more about what's happening out there and bring us into the know. But we also use it to sort of blast out some information. And in this case, we use it to document the ChangeLogs 2015 conference scene. And that was an evolving issue.

And Brian, you were the very first person to come on there and comment. And what you said was GopherCon, Gopher's Rule. And then you linked out to GopherCon.com, which was great because not long after that we sunk up and now you're on our list of conferences we're going to as the changelog and changelog films. So that was pretty cool. I'm quick. Quick trigger finger. You are quick trigger finger. um let's let's talk a bit about i guess we sort of talked about what it takes to create a conference like this but but when we say like this can we can we share a bit about the size change from last

year to this year and what the space is so big this year i've been talking to heather and you guys behind the scenes about what's what's all going into making this year's 2015 go for con take place but you know can we talk about the size difference of last year to this year and what's been learned? Sure. So I guess it might help with history of the progression, too. So when Brian and I first started talking about this, we knew it was something we were new to. And I guess the original idea was more a regional style conference you know two to 300 people so we made room for about 400 people to begin with assuming you know that'd be our cap

and we ended up selling out and we worked with a hotel to make room for more people and i think we bumped it up to around like 500 or 550 we We sold out again. We made room for 750 people. And then I think that batch of tickets sold out in less than a week. And then we were capped. There was no more room left in the hotel to expand. So with that amount of growth and just the huge adoption of Go, even in the last year since GopherCon, is just staggering. So we wanted to make room for kind of where our home should be from now on. And the convention center, the Colorado Convention Center there in Denver, had a lot more room

for us. So, I mean, the main ballroom that's split the same way it was last year here is 50,000 square feet so we have a lot of space and we made room for 1500 people this year uh so we hope we sell out and and in some respects we hope we don't because then what do we do next year grow yeah and logistically i think after 1500 you almost have to do multi-track and we've been trying to stay single track but we'll see how it goes well just curious about the name gopher con um you can you can throw the f on the end or you can take the f off the comic-con that's

that's a convention rails conf that's a conference maybe splitting hairs a bit but did you leave the f off because you were planning on it being a convention at sunday or was that just kind of how how it fell out it just didn't it didn't sound as good gopher conf doesn't sound as good as gopher con good point well now it's named well because it at sizes, I mean, if there's 1,500 this year, that's 3,000 next year. And then 6,000 the year after that, right? Just kind of that exponential growth. You guys may have a convention on your hand. Yeah, we were speaking with a couple people that were saying, you know, things like Puppet Conf that, you know, we had so many people attend and so many great sponsors that helped make that event happen.

And, you know, we were just two programmers, you know, throwing a conference. So it was really great to see the community respond and all of our sponsors. And they were so great with us, too. They were kind of in the same boat we were. You know, they really wanted the conference, too. And if they could give us some money to help that happen, they were happy to. Let's talk about the one comment you got back from Rob Pite that really touched your heart. Can we talk about that a bit?

So, yeah, this is Brian. I can't give you the exact verbatim comment, but we were walking out of probably lunch on the last day. So there were still a few talks left to give on the last day, but most of the conference had already happened. And he turned around to me and he said, I can't thank you enough for making this happen. This is such an amazing event. And it really feels like watching our baby go off to her debutante ball. It feels like our baby's growing up and become bigger than us. It really was heartwarming to see that appreciation and joy, actually, in Rob's eyes. He was very excited. It's like his little girl was going off and getting married and starting her own family. It was a big deal. I think the whole team really, really loved the atmosphere. Everybody there was so excited. Just the conversations and things that were taking place was just mind-blowing.

I'm not sure of the exact percentage, but I'm fairly certain that the majority of the GO team will be at this year's event as well. Let's break that down then, since we've talked about last year and this year's size changes and what it takes. So this year is happening July 7th through July 10th in Denver, Colorado. So pretty easily accessible from an airport standpoint. It's three days, after parties, a hack day, and an optional workshop day. Does that about break it up into how you describe the tracks and what's going on with the actual conference itself? Yeah, and there's going to be some outside events too.

Some of the sponsors are working on planning some events on nights outside of the after party. And then the Denver Go Group is doing a kickoff party like they did last year at Galvanized as well. Yes. And which day is that on? That is on Tuesday, the same day as the workshops. Okay. So basically, if you're getting there that night and you're not attending the workshops or you're getting there that day to attend the workshops, there's something going on that night for you to take part in.

So watch the hashtag. What is the hashtag for this conference? Go for con. Go for con. Hashtag go for con. Hashtag go for con. So if you follow that, hopefully you'll be up to the know in all the things happening with the conference itself. Anything else you guys want to talk about in terms of the the track itself any particular talks that you guys are excited about

uh a keynote speaker or in terms of talks we've got some really amazing stuff we've got um dimitri vyukov coming in from russia he's on the go team now previously from Intel, an amazing technical guy who is going to talk about changes to scheduling in Go 1.5. Personally, that's probably the thing I'm most excited about. We've also got Rick Hudson, who's coming in to talk about the changes to garbage collection in Go 1.5 and memory management. That's going to be another really big one. Honestly, all the talks are going to be amazing this year. And, I mean, Hannah Kim's coming in to talk about Go on mobile devices, which is really interesting.

And that's kind of a pattern that we like with the talk selections, too, is to get some things that are slightly different. Like last year, you know, we were excited to get the GoBot guys in there because it was something totally different from what everybody else was using Go for. And we've got GoKit. GoKits, we're really excited about that and wanting to see its progression.

There's pretty much all of the talks I want to see. And there were so many that we wanted to see and unfortunately had to turn down too because we had a nine to one ratio for slots to fill versus submissions. We had 164 proposals this year. Can we talk? Go ahead. Go ahead, Brian. I was just going to say, talk about heartbreaking. When you get 164 proposals for 22 speaking slots, it's so painful to turn down all those great proposals.

Sure, out of 164, I probably could have easily enjoyed watching 120 of those talks. There were so many good proposals, so it was very painful turning a lot of really good proposals down. That's interesting to see the ratio of talks proposed to the attendees coming, too. Like they're in the same ballpark but missing a couple zeros or missing one extra zero, I guess. But in terms of how many proposals versus how many people will double because there's such a diverse amount of topics to cover about Go. I know when we had Andrew Duran on recently, at the tail end of the call, we started to talk about mobile a little bit. So it's exciting to hear more about what's happening in mobile because they're working towards things for Android first and 1.5. And I know he was pretty excited about the the efforts taking place there yeah we're we're definitely really excited

to see all the places that go is is taking off and distributed systems world it seems like everybody who's building a new distributed systems tool is is all go maybe let's uh be slightly self-promotional at this point uh let's talk about why we're why we're involved together uh the changelog and gopher con and you guys um and i guess i can maybe crack that nut if you don't mind um we are working with you guys to we opened up sort of a films division to our to our company we started shooting this um well how would you describe it jared how would you describe beyond code is like an interview series would you call it that yeah that's exactly what exactly how we call it i don't know what to

call it um a film a short short film i don't know interview series what do you want to call it i'd say like a brief interview series we shoot only conferences. So the whole point is like to be in the scene itself, to be enmeshed, immersed into the community. And it's all about finding not so much the people, but just feeling the heartbeat of the community, which is what I loved about you, Brian and Eric, about your passion towards GopherCon was that it seemed like that's exactly where you were coming from so we were in synergy in terms of like what we were trying to do with that but also in addition to you know our interview series called Beyond Code we also want to start working with conferences to help them shoot like a creative

documentary style behind the scenes look from the speaker's point of view to highlight reels to promotional videos and so we're working with you this year. So if you see people running around with cameras, um, like couple cameras,

a mic, something like that, it's likely us. I don't think you have anybody else going to be there running around like cameras and mics. Do you guys, uh, we just have the,

uh, AV company recording the talks themselves. So we won't have anybody running around with cameras and mics, but I mean, we're really excited about having you guys there too because one thing we wish we had last year was b-roll footage i mean unless you were there it was really hard to describe just the atmosphere there and how excited everybody was yeah and that's our aim too so if you see us running around and we ask you to hop on camera no it's it's legitimately you know it's legitimately asked for by eric and brian they want us there they want us to sort of document what's happening there and we love the community of go and we want to be a part of it as well so being there and doing that

is just going to like hopefully change the game for for you guys in terms of documenting how this conference played out the people that are involved there and and just give a lot of nice artifacts and takeaways for this conference. So that's a neat thing I'm pretty excited about personally. Me too, actually. I think one of the disappointments I have from last year is that we don't really have any professional photographs. We don't have any significant recordings. There's no takeaway from last year other than the recorded videos that Confrics did. really have any professional photographs. We don't have any significant recordings. You know, there's no takeaway from last year other than the recorded videos that Confrics did.

And I enjoy watching them over, but I'd really love to have, you know, a more intimate recording experience. And I'm really looking forward to you guys coming in this year and kind of giving us that way to look back and show me how much fun I had while I was there and then show a new view into what GopherCon is for maybe potential attendees next year. So since you mentioned attendees, let's try to get some attendees. So we're at how many, do you talk about how many ticket sales you have? I know you just had the announcement of a thousand recently, but do you kind of give down to the beat of where you're at? Do you talk about how many ticket sales you have? I know you just had the announcement of 1,000 recently, but do you kind of give down to the beat of where you're at? I haven't looked today, but we're definitely above 1,000. We're following the same trend we did last year where the last, I don't know, the last 25 or 30% of the tickets sold really fast about two months before the conference. So my expectation is now that we're above 1,000

and now that we're within 60 days, it's going to sell out really fast. What we're seeing now is big companies, big groups of 20 and 30 people booking all at once. So the tickets really go faster towards the end. And it's really fun to watch the emails come in. XYZ, large fortune 100 company just booked 30 tickets wow that is that is so cool those are the kind of emails you're getting right

now yeah wow that's awesome yeah i love the ones where it's a random company too and you're like what i wonder what they're using go for yeah well that's awesome so if you're listening right now you're thinking man i'm really considering going to this conference, now is the time to step in, buy your ticket. And can we talk about the ticket buying experience? And only to mention this one other thing because I was sort of surprised by it. And when we talked several weeks back and I actually bought this portion of it, I was like, what is this? And then we sort of dove deep into this topic of discussing diversity. And you have a diversity scholarship support fund. It's not an admission ticket, but you can give whatever amount you'd like. I think you can multiply it.

Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of when you register to go? What is that about? Sure. So when you go to go for con.com, there's a link at the top for, um, registration. And that takes you to a landing page hosted by Tito, which is a really nice company that does a good ticket sales for us. And the options that you have for, um, choosing tickets include general admission,

plus a donation to our diversity scholarship fund, which isn't actually an admission ticket. It's just a donation that helps us bring people in who ordinarily wouldn't be able to attend. So our concept behind the diversity scholarship fund is that, you know, your typical conference, especially lately, has just been a slew of white guys standing around talking about cool computer programming stuff. But we know the workforce in programming isn't just white guys. It's a lot more than that.

So we want to make GopherCon representative of the workforce, representative of the population. And if there's anything that we can do to help financially make that happen, that's what the Diversity Scholarship Support Fund is for. So anybody who makes a donation to that, we've got an online scholarship application form on the GopherCon website. You can go in and say, you know, hey, I'm kind of an underrepresented group. I would love to get some of those funds. It would help me attend GopherCon. We've got a committee

that will help allocate those funds and try to bring people in that normally wouldn't be able to attend so that the faces we see in the audience actually represent the faces of people who are doing Go across the world. I think the other thing we should point out too is the scholarship fund doesn't just go towards attendees. It also helps for underrepresented groups in speaking as well. So some of the stuff that we'd like to do is assist in getting maybe public speaking training and things like that to kind of open the doors for more people to jump up on stage and feel comfortable doing so.

Yeah, that's a great point. That was Dave Cheney's idea. The idea that in order to foster good public speaking, you not only have to accept a first-time speaker who might be new to speaking, but make sure that their speaking experience is a positive one and not a negative one. So anybody who requests assistance can get some funds from us to get good public speaking training. And that's another great way to build diversity in the speaking community so that someone who perhaps was afraid to speak before can have a good experience at GopherCon and go out and speak at other conferences too. Dave has really led the proposals committee and has been working a lot with the speakers. And he's done a phenomenal job with that. He set up kind of a mentoring program where some of the more experienced speakers will help mentor some of the less experienced ones to kind of help them refine and practice their talks so that they can feel more comfortable getting on stage.

And I thought that that was a terrific idea. Because a lot of people, it's almost a similar issue to contributing to open source. People are afraid of the judgment on the other side, so they just don't step up. And I think by having these mentoring programs and offering speaker training and things like that, I think that we can hopefully start seeing a lot more new faces on stage. I like the way you're taking the, you know, the banner, not only to create the ability for the community to converge together, but also helping the community come in a positive way, especially on the speaker side here that, you know, that's such a neat thing. You don't see that often from conference organizers, especially two programmer conference organizers that just sort of like

decide one day, hey, I'm going to register Go4Con and put this thing together. You know, two years ago, it's really nice to see that your hearts are investing in the community and a positive community convergence together. I think that's really awesome. There are conferences out there that are solely made for making money. And Go4Con is certainly not one of those conferences. Our conference is about building community. And community means everybody. It doesn't mean just the people who look like me and think like me. And Eric and I both strongly agree that the more diverse that community is, the stronger we'll all be. The Go community right now is an amazing community. It's inclusive and it's be. You know, the Go community right now is an amazing

community. It's inclusive and it's strong, and we only want to do everything we can to keep it that way. That's awesome. So when you go to go4con.com to buy tickets, you can get a general admission ticket for 500 bucks. They have a special field there for a donation to the Diversity Scholarship Support Fund. It's a nice text field, so you can crank that number up or down to your liking. We hope that you crank it up because that's a great initiative. You guys also have some other interesting fields on the ticket purchasing page, which is for child care. Can you tell us about that? Sure. That's actually a continued part of the diversity project that we have going on. we realize that there are people, men, women, all sorts of people who might not be able to attend the conference because they've got children at home. And it's more difficult for them to attend because of those children.

So we contracted with local registered daycare providers, and we'll be providing daycare for any children from 1 to 15 years old at the conference, and that's free of charge. So if having your kids with you is the thing that keeps you from coming, we're going to fix that. So all they need to do is just give us a notice of how many kids they're going to bring in each age group so we can have the appropriate number of daycare staff present. And the older kids, we're even trying to organize some little programming camps for them. Very cool. So that they can have their own little gopher con. Great idea.

No promises on that yet because it's not finalized. But that's our goal is to have some programming activities, some more fun things to do rather than just sitting around playing Nintendo all day. Oh, kids don't play nintendo any i'm showing my age what what do the kids play minecraft they're playing minecraft watching minecraft on twitch yes that's so funny because i didn't register that you were wrong uh so it shows my age too well not wrong but just not exactly correct for the current time that we're in so there's a good shout out to one of our diamond sponsors twitch my son who's 13 he would rather watch minecraft on twitch than do anything else in the world and when he saw the twitch logo on the gopher con page as a diamond

sponsor wow he immediately wanted to know if he could meet uh whoever it is the guy that he watches all some some really amazing minecraft guy and that's a thing. I don't understand why watching people play Minecraft is cool, but it really is for my 13 year old. So we're excited to have Twitch there. And we know that they use a lot of go on their backend to power their systems. So. It's like rock and roll music. You don't get it. You know?

Yeah. You know, you're getting old when you're like, why did the kids watch the Minecraft on the internet? You know, I don't, I don't get it either, even though I was a gamer all my life. And yeah, just getting older. Just getting older. They get it. They get it.

So you guys got tons of people supporting this in all walks. You've got some great sponsors. Who are some of your biggest sponsors? Who would you want to give some huge thanks to for making Go for Con this year possible? So our biggest sponsors are Google, Twitch, and Cisco. And honestly, we've got dozens of sponsors all the way down to the bronze level. We could not possibly pull this conference off at the insanely low prices that we're doing without them. So we have to give them just all the thanks and kudos that we can because having a conference of this quality at such a low price is impossible without these kind of sponsorship dollars. So big plus to all of our sponsors, go for con.com slash sponsors. You can see them

and shoot them some love for yourself. Yeah. They've, they've all been incredible. They're trying to organize things outside of the event. They're offering assistance, however they can. Many of them are offering to give us feet on the ground if we need help stuffing bags. Very cool. And last year, a lot of people were quick to jump on, and we got a bunch of return sponsors this year. It's been really exciting, and we're so glad for their support. If someone's hearing this for the first time right now, and they're like, man, I wish I

would have sponsored this, is there still time to sponsor there's we're we've passed our deadline but that's mainly because of printing so right now our shirts are going to go out for print so we'd be happy to bring in more sponsors with the expectation that they wouldn't be able to be on the shirts and anything that we've already gone out for printing on by the time they come in for sponsorship gotcha that's cool i like the sponsor you guys have here so we talked a bit earlier about twitch and uh i think it was brian or brian i think it was you mentioning your son wasn't it yeah a little twitch addict yes that's that's that's perfect for him. Cool. Yeah, my fiance is the most excited about TimeHop. Yes, my wife, she loves TimeHop,

except for now that Facebook has a feature that's slightly similar to TimeHop. She's always comparing like, is Facebook's feature better? Is TimeHop's feature better? I'm like, well, you choose, babe, whichever you like. So she likes TimeHop as well.

One of the things that's really fun for me as a business owner, a person who's running a company, is the fact that these sponsors that we have this year for GopherCon, a good 50% or 60% of them are vendors to my company. We use Docker. We use Cisco. We use all kinds of these different companies. We use CoreOS. We use InfluxDB. we use Iron.io, we use Datadog.

All of these sponsors are people that are really deep into the Go community and providing a great service. So for us, it's extra special because not only are they sponsors to the conference, but they're people that we do business with. And that's really kind of cool. And doesn't CoreOS also have something going on with the night party, right? There's an after party sponsored by them? Yeah, we don't have specifics on that yet, but yeah, they're working on an after party themselves.

Very cool. I should also highlight that some of the companies that we don't currently use because of the sponsorships have kind of drawn our eye towards them too. Exactly. For other needs. So become a sponsor, get our attention, we might start using you kind of thing. Yeah, although I doubt our market is big enough for them to worry about that. Still, it's really cool that we've met a lot of great companies.

You know, another one that's surprising, Kismatic, was somebody I hadn't even heard of, and they reached out, and they've got some really great Kubernetes consulting that they're doing. Didn't even know that there was a cottage industry building up around Kubernetes now. That's great. Well, I think, you know, when we zoom out and we look at everything you guys are doing with GopherCon, it's definitely about organizing the community. It's, you know, as you mentioned, it's not about profiting from a community. It's about joining a community.

And, you know, the only thing I would say, and this is sort of like maybe public advice, is I wish the information about the diversity program and the child care was before the registration page because I think that's such unique, important information. I think our community as a whole needs to hear about. And one shows how much you guys really care about the diversity of the community because that's an effort that's not taking place. You guys are really taking care to look at all the finer details to make this community as diverse as possible. And I think it's just something that doesn't happen every day. And I'm really happy that you've done that. It's really awesome that you're leading the way in that way. Thanks. It means a lot to us.

So one month, 18 days, 10 hours from now, people will converge upon Denver, Colorado, July 7th through 10th, and enjoy workshops, the main event for one day and two days, and then a final hack day. Can you talk a little bit about the hack day as we trail off? Yeah. So last year, the hack day was kind of just a side effect that we created. We had the two main days, and we assumed most people aren't going to want to leave right after 5 p.m., head to the airport, that everybody would be trickling out the next day. So we reserved space so everybody could hack, and there'd be some lightning talks early in the morning. And it turned out to be, I think, around four hours of lightning talks. And it was just crazy. And Brian and I were up

that morning and we kept watching more and more people go down the escalator and we're like, oh, because we had anticipated that, you know, it would be, you know, less than half the people kind of coming and going as they had to leave for flights. And it turned out everybody wanted to stay. So this year we, we rolled it in and made it a formal part of the event and we made enough space for everybody to attend. The lightning talks will take place in the main theater and we will have those recorded this year. And in addition to that, we have a couple of hack rooms that we're still formalizing exactly what will be in those, but they will be themed rooms with different kinds of projects and activities going on,

hacking on specific projects, things of that nature. And as we formalize those, we'll be releasing more information online about it too. But I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And I encourage anybody who's going to the conference to stay for Hack Day. Hack Day is a big deal. It's a blast. So the 10th, the Hack Day, is a Friday. And so the conference itself, the main one day, day one and day two, is on a Wednesday and Thursday. And July 7th, which is the workshop day, is a Tuesday. So it's during the work week. So if it's someone who can't take a weekend

or something like that, it's harder to take a weekend, a little easier to get off for work or be sponsored by their employer to get there. It's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday is the final hack day. We're going to be there for all the days except for the workshop.

The change loggers are arriving on the 7th, not that that matters, but that's just when we're going to get there. And hopefully we're going to hit up that meet up that night and then be there all the way to the 10th, to the end. One thing I should point out about Tuesday, the workshop day, is with the talks starting early on Wednesday, a lot of people are going to be arriving Tuesday. We have worked out registration to take place between 12 and 6 on Tuesday. So if you fly in on Tuesday, like between 12 and 6, feel free to come down and register that way. There's not as big of a crowd Wednesday morning. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, let's

encourage that. If you're there early, if you get there on Tuesday, just register on Tuesday. Save yourself the line and the craziness on July 8th, which is the morning there. So very cool. The last thing I want to mention is for the Beyond Code piece. Since it's so many people, it's like normally we just go to a conference that's maybe, I don't know, Jerry, what would you say, like 200 or 300 people? Maybe is our max so far doing this for us. So to go to 1,500 for us is a much bigger stretch. So I think that the way we would like to maybe handle it, we'll still take the sort of walk-ins, so to speak,

but it would be really awesome to sort of capture people in advance. So Brian and Eric, it would be awesome to work with you guys in tandem with that. But just here on the audio while people are listening to this, we're going to put up a signup form on our site and we'll work with Brian and Eric to make that visibly known to everyone else. We'll figure out how to formalize it. But if you want to come on Beyond Code, it's about a five to eight minute interview, totally about you. We'd love to have you. If there's something you want to say specifically about your involvement in the Go community, while we're there at the conference, we'd love to sort of like earmark people to talk to.

That way we make sure that we get the great footage that you guys really want us to have coming from this year's GopherCon. So we'll make that available in the show notes. So check out the show notes for this. And then we'll work with Brian and Eric to sort of press that information out to the rest of the Go community that's actually attending GopherCon, not just those who are listening. But if you're listening to this and you're not going,

we all got sad faces on. So what's going you go to go for con.com right now um purchase tickets get signed up support let me ask you this guys maybe this is something you plan for but is there a way for people who don't attend to support this diversity initiative that you've got going on absolutely the the tickets can be bought, and we've had plenty of people donate to the diversity fund who aren't attending. So you can buy a ticket for $10 or a ticket for $1,000. We've had companies that have contributed significant amounts of money towards those diversity funds, and they're not attending.

So it's easy to buy the diversity support tickets without attending. Wow. Please do. Yeah, speakers have also been donating as well. So that's the process then is just to go purchase tickets, but don't actually purchase one for yourself. Just fill out the part that is about the diversity scholarship fund and magic. Correct.

I love it. That's all awesome. All right. Is there anything else you guys want to cover before we tail off and say goodbye to everybody? No, I think just encouraging everybody to go. The atmosphere there has been phenomenal, better than any conference I've ever been to. And I also encourage other people to do more things to help the community. Start local meetup groups. Do your own conferences. Although I recommend for logistics to stay small enough where you

can stay inside a hotel and small enough where you don't have to feed people. And it makes things significantly easier. But yeah, definitely encouraging people to do things that help foster the community and help it grow. Yeah. And find us on Twitter or email. Eric and I have been giving a lot of advice to all of the other global Go conferences about, you know, how to pull those things off. If you want to run a conference across the globe and you even want to use the GopherCon name, we don't care as long as you're not running one in the United States,

you can use GopherCon like GopherCon India did. And we'd be happy to give them lots of advice on how to run one. Very cool. That's awesome. Well, fellows, thank you so much for caring so much about the community. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and talk to Jared and I about GopherCon 2015. I know we're excited to be there and to be a part of it with you and help document such an awesome community converging on Denver. Once again, July 7th to July 10th, purchase your ticket today or support the Diversity Scholarship Fund, which is super awesome to do.

Even if you're not going, head to go4con.com to find all the news. And check out the show notes for any extra links we mentioned, like the sign-up form for Beyond Code and all the other things. So with that, everyone let's say goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for having us. See ya. you