Mark Bates is the founder and chief architect of the Boston, MA based consulting company, Meta42 Labs. Mark spends his days focusing on new application development and consulting for his clients. At night he writes books, raises kids, and occasionally he forms a band and “tries to make it”. Mark is the author of three books, “Distributed Programming with Ruby” (2009), “Programming in CoffeeScript” (2012), and “Conquering the Command Line” (2014). He also runs the weekly Golang screencast site, www.metacasts.tv.
Qs. Why and when did you decide to start working with Go?
Mark: I had started playing with Go in mid-2013 while trying to find a solution to some concurrency and speed problems I was having in Ruby. It wasn’t until a weekend in Istanbul with Andrew Gerrand and Blake Mizerany that I really fell in love with it.
Qs. What are you currently working on?
Mark: A lot. :) Apart from client work, I’m spending a lot of time on MetaCasts.tv, my weekly Go screencast series.
Qs. Where do you see Go in the foreseeable future?
Mark: I can see Go doing what Ruby did about 6 or 7 years ago. Really revolutionizing and liberating people to build bigger, more sophisticated apps quickly, that also scale well right from the beginning.
Qs. How should one go about acquiring knowledge and skills in Go? What’s the best approach?
Mark: I would be lying if I didn’t say that I thought MetaCasts.tv is a great place for people to start learning Go.
Qs. Which areas in Go should a would-be Go programmer concentrate on, in your opinion?
Mark: Depends on their level of experience. Junior developers should always concentrate on learning good solid fundamentals that are independent of the language itself. For everyone else, my biggest advice is to embrace the Go way of writing code. Don’t try to force the patterns and techniques from your previous language on it. You’ll struggle and fail.
Qs. Do you have any parting words for our readers? Anything you would like to share with them?
Mark: I would just re-iterate my previous point about embracing Go’s patterns and the “Go” way of doing things. Your code will thank you for it, and you’ll have a lot more fun if you do.
Thanks Mark for sharing your views with us. I am confident that your insights would help all the would-be Go programmers. In case you have any queries and/or questions, kindly post your questions here (as comments to this blog post) and Mark would be glad to answer.
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