Project Athens - A Proxy Server for Go Modules by Aaron Schlesinger

Join us for your February dose of Gopher awesomeness!

We have the honour of having Aaron Schlesinger, Sr. Software Engineer at Microsoft and founder of Go In 5 Minutes (https://www.goin5minutes.com/), dial in from the US to share with an exciting project he's been working on called The Athens Project (https://github.com/gomods/athens).

We have a great venue right across the Sandton Gautrain station. It should be an easy trip for anyone close to a Gautrain station.

You're also more than welcome to join us remotely via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/300487606

Hope to see you all!

Speaker's summary:

Go 1.11 is a big release for all of us because we got a new package management system called modules. There’s some really cool stuff in modules, but the thing that matters the most is the module download API.

We used to download dependency code directly from GitHub, and over time we ran into problems. The download API lets us fix those problems in a really elegant way: we can build module proxies that store code in their own storage, and Gophers can fetch modules from there, without changing anything about how they work. Even better, we can store modules in CDNs to make things even faster. The Athens project is leading the way toward this new world, and it’s a big step forward for our community!

In this talk, I’ll start with some history of the twists and turns we’ve taken to get to modules, and talk about the problems we still face today. I’ll talk about how Athens solves these problems and how it works, and of course, I’ll finish up live demos of Athens in action!

You’ll walk away understanding why module proxies matter, what they actually fix, how they make your life easier, and how you can start using Athens (or any proxy you choose) right away with not that much work. You’ll also learn why you might want to set up your own Athens server and how to do that. And added bonus - you’ll be able to delete your vendor directories and break out of the GOPATH if that’s your thing!

Sponsor:
Jemstep is a Silicon Valley-based firm, founded in South Africa and then acquired by Invesco Ltd. Our product is an open investment platform for financial advisors, RIAs, IBDs, banks and insurers. It is built using a functional approach (Scala), by engineering teams in Johannesburg and now other locations around the world.