On December 2, 2018, the first mitap held by the Kazan Go community was held.
On January 5 of next year, the next one is planned.

In this article I will talk a little about the newly created community, our plans, the last mitap, and also the program of the upcoming meeting.

Go user groups

If you look at the wiki / GoUserGroups page , you can see a lot of communities in different cities and countries.

Despite the fact that the list under this link cannot be regarded as exhaustive, there are only three Russian communities described there:

• Golang Moscow - Moscow, Russia.
• Golang Peter - Saint Petersburg, Russia.
• Golang Novosibirsk - Novosibirsk, Russia.

It so happened that I do not live in any of these cities and it’s not quite convenient to travel to mitapes in them. Search in other sources also did not reveal the presence of high activity Go community in Kazan or Nizhny Novgorod.

There were meetup-tatar and meetup-nizhny in the Russian-speaking community . This could be enough for communication and start, but for regular meetings you need more participants and reach a wider audience. The problem is weak in that not everyone wants to use it, and some simply have never heard of this workspace (golang-ru).

If the goal of the community is to popularize the technology and help in mastering it and solving the problems that arise with it, then additional efforts and platforms are needed, one channel is not enough in the slaka.

Looking at the wiki / GoUserGroups now, you will see Golang next to other Russian-speaking groups. We added before the publication of this article itself.

Start with "why?"

Suppose you, like me, want to occasionally meet with people with similar interests, discuss some pressing (mostly technical) problems, listen to what you have to tell others, and sometimes act as a speaker yourself. It is not necessary to mark every item, but I think most of them at least some of this may be necessary to a greater or lesser extent.

When I worked in Intel Russia , there was no big choice of city for living. In Nizhny Novgorod there is an excellent "IT party", among which I am most familiar with GDG Nizhny Novgorod , it52 and defcon_nn . But no one exclusively held meetings on Go on a regular basis.

When it becomes difficult to live by work alone, you begin to notice the space around you, the shortcomings of the city and its infrastructure, the lack of any activities.

For me, the answer to the question "Why?" there was a desire to improve the space in which I live. Moving to another city was another option, but there would be problems of a different nature.

Moreover, it all looked like a problem to be solved. When such a problem comes up before your eyes, it’s hard to stop thinking.

Nizhny Novgorod

In Nizhny Novgorod we managed to hold two meetings, one open source contribution meeting, and also participated in the hackathon Hacktoberfest-2018.

At the first meeting, which I tried not to announce as "mitap", 2 people came (but what people!).

I wanted to know how many people can come if there are almost no attempts to advertise the event. But perhaps the format of "get together and share in open source" simply can not have a large number of people willing to participate.

But to my “real mitapas”, to my surprise, quite a few people came. 50-55 people gathered for the first, more than 70 came for the second (with 104 registrations).

It would seem that further work on the reproduction and maintenance (perhaps it is even more difficult than starting), but I left my team and returned to Kazan. If it were not for this circumstance, I would now talk about how cool we all turned out in Nizhny Novgorod and how much Ekaterina Vinnichenko helped with this.

The Nizhny Novgorod Go community has not gone anywhere, perhaps at the next DevFest conference there will be several speakers from the Go community (there was only one last).

Kazan or Tatarstan?

Start with an almost clean slate.

According to preliminary estimates, Kazan seemed to have fewer Go programmers and fewer companies that use Go in development. But at the same time, there is Innopolis next to us, who has already conducted several events directly related to our favorite programming language (in some of which I even took part). The above meetup-tatar mentioned meetup-tatar channel included people from Yoshkar-Ola, which is not part of Tatarstan.

There were two options for the name: Golang Golang or Golang .

In order to avoid undesirable division of an already small, but already existing community, I chose Golang Tatarstan . The same name allowed to avoid problems with Innopolis, which is not part of Kazan, but is part of Tatarstan. It is important for us to cooperate, and not to create ground for misunderstanding and competing out of the blue.

For a while, all the groups and channels that I created wore a regional name. But now the choice of the name Golang looks more reasonable. This is more honest with the rest of the cities. An additional argument in favor of binding to a specific city is the GDG guideline , to be part of which can be beneficial for all parties. Soon the widespread renaming of s/Tatarstan/Kazan/ may occur.

Community plans and goals

The main task is to increase Go awareness among Kazan IT-specialists.

At the very first meeting, during the opening, our main goals and tools were called.

Here is a sample list of how we can help make Go a popular technology in Kazan and its surroundings:

• (1 star) High-quality blog posts, articles and other publications in various media.
• (1 star) Organization and participation in meetings (+ smaller informal meetings)
• (2 stars) Workshops
• (2 stars) Courses and master classes (online and offline, including at universities)
• (3 stars) Participation in local conferences (1 or more of our speakers)
• (5 stars) Organization conference (or participation in organization)

Time to go

The first mitap was helped by the guys from FIX . They provided a platform, tea and coffee with cookies for a break. The budget was zero (there were no sponsors), so this support was invaluable.

Reports:

• It is necessary to rewrite everything on Go - Iskander Sharipov
• Personal pain when working with the database in Go - Robert Egorov
• Go +5 to benefits, -5 to pain - Alexander Nemtaryov

There was no record, but there is a small photo report .

Approximately 30% of participants said that they use Go at work anyway. Approximately 40-50% of the participants are not familiar with Go and came out of curiosity. Perhaps it makes sense to organize separate meetings specifically for beginners, where all the reports will be of the initial level, plus always give some short introductory speech about Go.

The good news was that some people wanted to help in this endeavor. We exchanged contacts, and some of us continued to communicate in the nearest cafe.

Happy new Go year

Our next mitap will be almost immediately after the new year, January 5th!

Currently 4 reports confirmed. There is a place in the program for the fifth report, so if you are interested in coming and talking about something related to Go, you can safely say so in the comments.

• Ilya Shikhaleev will talk about how to work with errors in Go better and not drown in them. This report is especially useful for beginners gofers.
• Olga Smirnova will describe how to attract the attention of HR and correctly state your skills, as well as how to escape from this attention after you find your dream job.
• Anton Kucherov will tell you what pitfalls await you when implementing microservice architecture and how to safely try microservices if you do not have the resources to write your own framework.
• Sergey Shambir to share instructions "how to build your project on Go in docker through docker in docker".

Very much Ilya helped with the organization. He will not only arrive with the report, but will also help with the iSpring to cover the costs of the event.

Join, unite and organize!

If you live somewhere in Tatarstan or even in Kazan itself, you can follow the announcements in the vk group or on the site meetup.com .

We invite active gophers from other cities as speakers.