4 min readUpdated Mar 23, 2023

Ably at GopherCon UK

Ably at GopherCon UK
Beth LoftBeth Loft

Ably was the delegate sponsor at GopherCon UK this year and we had a great time. The conference was held in The Brewery, London. For many of our team members it was the first physical developer event they had been to in almost two years.

Whilst I am thrilled to be returning to face-to-face interaction and the depth of conversation they enable, I certainly forgot how early a start physical events are. Thankfully, the barista service being stationed in the delegate lounge meant drinks were never more than a few footsteps away. It seemed like I wasn’t the only one who appreciated the coffee!

Highlights

The Ably team sat on bean bags with an Ably banner in the background.

The conference had two keynotes each day; Go Large! by Bryan Boreham and Zero to OpenFaaS in 60 months by Alex Ellis on Monday. Software development reimagined by André Eriksson and Scaling Using Go by Adam Hicks on Tuesday.

The two tracks also featured talks including Distributed Face-recognition running on Kubernetes, Instrumenting Go applications with Open Telemetry and Optimizing Go for Clouds to name a few. The talks were recorded and we will update this post with them once they are published.

What We Got Up To

Ably swag; a water bottle, a pair of socks, a hoodie, a tshirt and lots of stickers

There was a lot going on at GopherCon for Ably (including some eye-roll inducing Go puns between our team members), some of our Ablyans attended for learning and development purposes, being Gophers themselves, whilst others were in the delegate lounge to represent Ably and help run the hackathon that we challenged attendees to. The overall winner of the hackathon was Ably Text, the project was based on Teletext and used our API to broadcast tweet counts for a given hashtag in realtime, you can check out the entry here.

Our Developer Relations Engineer Tom Camp also gave a talk on making a basic chat app with Go and Pub/Sub, you can view his slides here.

Tom Camp stood behind a podium with a slide presentation to the side.

We also had a lot of fun playing rock, paper, scissors with attendees using Ably and Go. If you attended and got caught out with the changing icons right as you were about to win and get a point, just know that you are not alone! You can view the source code for it in the GitHub repository.

Conclusion

Three Ablyans sat on bean bags

It was a wonderful couple of days, our team learnt a lot, had fun socialising with everyone - including discovering who was secretly great at air hockey ? - and talking to people about how awesome Ably is!

You can keep up to date with us by following us on Twitter. If you organise an event you think we should be at, or if you have any questions, email us at [email protected].

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