Interview: Gopher Baiju Muthukadan

Baiju Muthukadan

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?

Baiju: I work as a technical architect at ZeOmega, Bangalore. I have contributed to many FOSS projects like Zope, Koha, SaltStack etc. I founded the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing project in 2001 while studying at REC, Calicut. I have conducted many Python related talks and workshops in various parts of India. During PyCon India 2013, I received the first Kenneth Gonsalves Award for my contributions to the Python community in India.

These two links has few more info about me:

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

Baiju: I am a Python enthusiast and using it professionally for more than 10 years. I got introduced to Go by my colleague, Chris during a conversation with him while he was visiting our Bangalore office in 2013. The simplicity of language surprised me even though it is compiled and statically typed.

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

Baiju: I would suggest the official tour to start with Go: http://tour.golang.org/. Learning Go by Miek Gieben is a good book.

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

Baiju: Generics is a hot topic always discussed in the Go community. Even though I am coming from a Python background, I did not feel the need for generics in Go.

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?

Baiju: There are many trending projects in Github: https://github.com/trending?l=go&since=monthly

Before selecting a project, check the activity of the community. Do the core developers comment on pull requests? Is there any active discussion forum/mailing lists exists? How friendly is the core team? etc.

BTW, I welcome contributions to my pet project: https://github.com/baijum/pitracker

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

Baiju: Lack of an interactive prompt was a challenge for me. But this lead me to use log package and running my web application using fresh and now looking forward to write more automated tests.

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

Baiju: I can see a lot of projects to support the idea of infrastructure as a code and there are many web applications projects. I think Go is a good replacement for Python, Java, Ruby, PHP etc. But Go is not going to replace C as a system language.

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

Baiju: As of 2014, Go is not yet been adopted like other mainstream languages. But I am very sure that in a few years there will be more adopters for Go.

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

Baiju: If you haven’t tried Go yet, spend some time with the official Go tour from your browser. If you are learning Go, organize and participate in Go meetups in your city.

Thanks Baiju 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 Baiju would be glad to answer.

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