I've just created two Google groups for the UK Go community. The group golang-uk is for discussions about Go that are mainly of interest to people in the UK. Go is Go wherever you are, so I don't expect this group to carry many technical discussions, if any. I envisage that its main use will be to advertise UK Go meetups and events such as the Golang UK conference which is scheduled for August: http://golanguk.com/
There are a few Go user groups around the UK organising local meetups. I'm one of the organisers of the Surrey Go User Group and we are finding it very hard work to make ourselves known. It looks like most other user groups have the same problem, which is why I set up the golang-uk group. One way for potential members to find out about local user groups is the list held on the Golang Wiki page https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUserGroups but you need to know about that to use it. Until now the main way we have promoted our group has been the meetup.com website, but that audience is a bit limited. Also, it costs $120 a year to advertise meetups on that site. For somebody who just wants to get together with a few like-minded people to discuss Go, a Google group is more practical. I've already found and contacted the Go meetups in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Cambridge and Suffolk. Some of the organisers have already joined the group and I hope that the rest will. I've also seen traces on Google of people trying to set up a group in Hampshire, but I haven't been able to contact them yet and I'm not sure how far they have got. If you know of any UK meetups that I've missed, please get them to announce themselves on golang-uk. The second group golang-uk-jobs is for advertising UK jobs involving Go. Go is taking off slowly but steadily in the UK. One rough measure of this is the number of jobs advertised on the website jobserve.com . (Jobserve is the most popular UK website for advertising IT jobs.) Over the last seven days there have been 26 permanent jobs advertised mentioning Golang, plus two contract roles. To put that into perspective, over the same period there were 1,113 ads for perm jobs using Java, and 453 contract roles. However, when I did a similar trawl a year ago, there were no Go jobs advertised. Jobserve only gives a rough measure of activity. Some jobs are advertised several times and some are not advertised at all - the UK Go community is small enough that some employers recruit through word of mouth. The Go London User Group often has a short hiring fair at the end of its meetings. The golang-uk-jobs group gives people another way to recruit directly. To avoid the jobs group being flooded with get-rich-quick schemes and other scams, all posts are moderated, so traffic should be light and relevant. Assuming that Go continues to grow, a mailing list will eventually become unwieldy, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I think that it's the right time for these groups and I hope that people will find them useful. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
