Go West Conference
October 24th, 2025
Lehi, Utah
The Go West conference is a hybrid conference for the Rocky Mountain West communities (Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Idaho).
It has two main goals:
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Highlight local talent and expertise in engineering with the Go programming language
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Bring world-renowned Go speakers to the area.
We love international participation. Everyone is welcome to attend and join in celebrating the communities that make Go great.
Schedule
Join us in-person for any or all of these activities
Time | Main Track |
|---|---|
9:30 am | Registration and Breakfast |
10:00 am | Opening Ceremony |
10:15 am | Building Production Grade AI in Go: a Live Post-mortem |
10:45 am | Snack Break |
11:00 am | Fundamentals of Memory Management in Go: Learning Through the History |
11:30 am | Spot the Nil Dereference: How to avoid a billion-dollar mistake |
12:00 pm | Lunch |
1:00 pm | Sign Up to Give a Lightning Talk |
2:00 pm | Conduit: Real-Time Data Streams Made Simple (and Fast) with Go |
2:30 pm | Go Channels Demystified |
3:00 pm | Snack break |
3:30 pm | Community Session |
4:00 pm | The basics of "go/ast" for people who can't even spell ast |
4:30 pm | You're already running my code in production: My journey to become a Go contributor |
5:00 pm | Raffle/After Party |
Sessions
The Go Standard Library vs. Open Source Tools – What, When, Why, and How
One of the strengths of Go is its small but powerful standard library. It gives us a stable foundation for building software, yet many developers underutilize it — sometimes reaching for 3rd-party libraries or writing custom wrappers when the std lib already provides what’s needed.
At the same time, there are places where the std lib is intentionally minimal. The Go Team has said many times that they don’t want to bloat the standard library, but instead prefer to encourage community-driven packages to grow around it. As Russ Cox put it:
“The Go standard library aims to provide the essential building blocks, not everything you might ever need. We rely on the open-source ecosystem to provide diversity and depth.”
— Russ Cox, Go Blog: “Go & Versioning” (2019)
Panelists
3
