New Kind of Tech Meetup in Sri Lanka: Colombo Gophers

I’ve been to a lot of tech meetups in Sri Lanka and they filled with a lot of crowd. Even my friends in US surprised with our numbers. But, only a few meetups have focused on discussions and interactivity.

In these days, we can google for anything and there are better mediums to learn rather than attending for a presentation.

So, what we need from a Meetup is a place for discussion and experience new things. In order to build that, we need to have some rules. I’ll talk about that in a moment. Before that, let’s see what is “Colombo Gophers”

Colombo Gophers

This is a gathering of a set of golang developers. Golang(or GO) is a system programming language built by Google. it’s used by high profile projects like Docker and top companies like Google, Mozilla and Cloudflare. It’s one of the fastest growing programming language.

Although it’s a general purpose programming language like Java, but it’s a perfect tool for system programming. You can use it for built web apps and even Android apps, but there are better languages and frameworks for those tasks.

What I can do with Go?

Go is trying to be a replacement for C++ with very easy to use programming model. It has built in support for concurrency and it’s very easy to build lock free programs.

You can use Go to built:

High Performance Servers
Microservices
System Tools
New Databases (At Kadira, we are working on such a DB)
Network and Middleware related tools

But it’s not ideal for building Web or Mobile apps.

Back to the Meetup: Colombo Gophers

As I mentioned, we at Kadira building a new kind of fast database engine in Go. Initially we had a lot of problems with GO and we found nobody in Sri Lanka to discuss and find solutions for our issues. Now we think it’s best to start a meetup and share our (and your) knowledge with each other.

We want this meetup to be highly interactive.
So, we’ll only accept few invites and we will post a challenge in order to attend the meetup.

This time, here is the challenge: https://play.golang.org/p/wd8GtWJlja

If you completed that, come join us for the Gophers Assemble

I wanna Attend, but I never tried GO before?

That’s totally fine. Trust me, you can learn GO in a day. If you are good at Java, C++, C#, Node or something similar, you can master GO in a week.

My Friend Thanish, wrote a getting started guide for Go and we’ll post new topics on the Colombo Gophers Medium Collection.

So, why do you wait. Learn some Go and join us for the Gophers Assemble.

What we do?

You might wonder, who is this random guy asking you to learn a new programming language? Let me give you some overview of who am I and what we do.

I’m Arunoda and I’m the founder of Kadira. Kadira is a performance monitoring solution for Meteor and we’ve a pretty good customer base. We process around 1billion metrics per day and it’s growing rapidly.

So we wanted to build a good metric aggregation engine for us. For that, we tried almost every DB we have access to. All of them have it’s own capabilities and weaknesses. But, none of them were solving our problem. For an example:

We could use Cassandra. But then, it uses a lot of server resources and it needs better maintenance. Since we are a Startup, we don’t that kind of luxury.

So, we decided to build an our own DB. Thanish and Myself took the challenge and we designed a pretty good timeseries DB in Go. We haven’t optimized it yet, but even at this moment we could handle over 150K writes per second in a single cloud VM (on Google Cloud). Most importantly, it’s performance is predictable.

I think we can demo it in the Gophers Assemble.

So What do you think?

Are you gonna learn some GO and join us for a new Tech Meetup experience in Sri Lanka.

Seriously, Do I need to learn to GO?