Qs. Welcome and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self?

Derek: Sure, I am Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera. Based in San Francisco, Apcera is a managed service technology company whose products optimize the deployment, orchestration and governance of a diverse set of workloads, on premise or on a public cloud provider. Prior to Apcera, I was a CTO at VMware where I created and architected the Cloud Foundry PaaS system. Prior to that, I was a Technical Director at Google for 5 years during which I co-designed the AJAX APIs (now part of the developers API group), the Javascript CDN initiative, and worked on the Gmail author photos. Before Google, I was SVP and Chief Architect at TIBCO, where I designed and architected their high-performance messaging systems.

Note: It was announced today that Ericsson has purchased a majority stake in Apcera.

Qs. Why and when did you decide to start working with Go?

Derek: When I started Apcera, I was considering both Go and Node.js languages. For Cloud Foundry, I’d selected Ruby for its speed of development, but it presented challenges in production. I liked Go for two main reasons: compiled static binaries and real stacks. In a production rollout, the single-binary-per-server component was very appealing, and the stacks being real and relieving pressure from the GC (Garbage Collection System) was something I had wanted since I abandoned Java many years ago. I always liked the idea of a GC in a modern language, but there were simply not enough good choices to relieve pressure from the GC system. Go had a simple and elegant solution for this. It’s a great language in my opinion, and I predicted its rise as such in a tweet over 2 years ago.

There was also a good article in Wired on Go’s rising popularity.

Qs. How should one go about learning the Go language? What material (books, eBooks, online tutorials etc.) would you recommend?

Derek: tour.golang.org is always a good place to start. I also like this eBook, https://leanpub.com/GoNotebook. Effective Go is also a great source of information.

Qs. What best practices are most important for a new Go programmer to learn and understand?

Derek: While Go is a simple language, mastering the basics is key. I recommend spending extra time on Channels and Interfaces, and gaining a solid understanding of Slices and how they are backed and work.

Qs. What are the pros and cons of Go that are being discussed in the development community and what is your opinion on that?

Derek: In my opinion, most of the discussions are positive. I think the pros heavily outweigh the cons. I really enjoy the language, and I have programmed in many, many different languages throughout my career. On the cons side, I think two stand out: generics and versioned dependencies. I don’t miss or need generics, but I know others are pushing hard for this feature to be introduced to the language. I agree with versioned dependencies; the language should add some decorations to the import statement to declare exactly which version of a package you want. The language creators argue that you should simply vendor your package dependencies; while I agree with that statement, at least to some degree, I think adding a decorator to help the middle ground is a good idea worth considering. There are also some third-party solutions that are gaining traction like Godeps.

Qs. Most beginners in Go would like to contribute their time, skills and expertise to a project but invariably are unaware of where and how to do so. Could you suggest some?

Derek: Well of course I may be a bit biased with suggestions to contribute to the NATS project whose server and client are written in Go. There is also a great link that shows the popular projects on github, https://github.com/trending?l=go. Docker of course is great, as well as CoreOS and etcd, along with some of Hashicorp’s projects, which are written in Go.

Qs. What has been your biggest challenge while working with Go?

Derek: That is a good question, and I really don’t have any. If anything, I would say some of the idiosyncrasies with channels, like panicking on a nil channel while releasing all readers on a closed one, etc. The language is simple yet powerful, and the tooling is great – please take advantage of it!

Qs. What types of applications are currently being developed in Go and what changes do you foresee over the next year or two?

Derek: These days, quite a bit of infrastructure, orchestration and platform automation, and tooling applications are written in Go. I expect this trend to continue. I think you may also see Go move onto ARM-based devices and take a place in the Internet of Things, as well as in some web and mobile application services tiers.

Qs. How do you see the market for Go Programmers in the work place? What is the future for Go?

Derek: It is still early, but each month more Go Programmers are coming online. I expect Go to gain quite a bit in popularity in the next few years.

Qs. Do you have any other suggestions for our readers?

Derek: Really play with the language and tooling. The tooling is one of the best I have ever seen, and the standard library allows you to do quite a bit before needing to reach out to third parties. And above all, have fun, it’s fun to program in Go.

Thanks Derek 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 Derek would be glad to answer.

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