Golang Birmingham - 8th October 2026 - Bluetel Solutions

Golang Birmingham | 8 October 2026

Golang Birmingham is back on 8 October!

We are pleased to announce that our next Golang Birmingham event will take place on Thursday, 8 October 2026.
We are delighted to welcome Samuel Adetunji, an experienced open-source Go engineer, and Kumbirai Tanekha, a Principal Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, who will be joining us from London.
Both speakers will share their knowledge and experience in two technical sessions exploring performance, systems programming and networking with Go.

BUILDING PERFORMANCE-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS IN GO: WRITING UNSAFE GO, SAFELY

Speaker: Samuel Adetunji
Go is known for its simplicity, safety and strong performance. However, there are situations where developers may need greater control over how their applications interact with memory and the underlying runtime.
In this session, Samuel Adetunji will explore the topic of performance-critical Go applications, focusing on the use of unsafe Go and the considerations involved in balancing performance with safety.
The talk will introduce an interesting area of Go development and encourage discussion around performance, engineering trade-offs and the responsibilities that come with working beyond the language's usual safety guarantees.
The main takeaway: Understanding where performance and safety intersect, and why working with unsafe Go requires careful engineering judgement.

ABOUT SAMUEL
Samuel Adetunji is an experienced open-source Go engineer with an interest in building high-performance software and exploring Go's capabilities.

FROM TAP TO CURL: BUILDING A USERSPACE TCP STACK IN GO

Speaker: Kumbirai Tanekha
When you call connect() or curl, the kernel quietly does a huge amount of work behind the scenes: building Ethernet frames, answering ARP, constructing IPv4 headers, and managing TCP handshakes and retransmissions.
In this talk, Kumbirai will peel back those layers by building a userspace Ethernet → IPv4 → ICMP/TCP implementation in Go, driven by a Linux TAP device. Every read and write becomes a raw frame that we can inspect, parse and craft ourselves.
The session will work through the networking stack layer by layer, exploring why TAP rather than TUN matters when working at Layer 2, how ARP turns an IP address into a real MAC address, how ICMP can be used to prove the IP path, and how to build a minimal passive TCP implementation capable of handling a handshake, in-order data, an echo or tiny HTTP server, and fixed-RTO retransmission.
Kumbirai will also look at what this deliberately minimal implementation does not attempt to build, including full windowing, congestion control and routing, and why leaving those pieces out can make the fundamentals easier to understand.
The main takeaway: TCP stops being magic and becomes a sequence of bytes that you can own, inspect and demystify, one stage at a time.

ABOUT KUMBIRAI
Kumbirai Tanekha is a seasoned Software Engineer based in London and currently works as a Principal Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks.
He enjoys deep diving into the foundations upon which systems are built and reimplementing the parts of technology that we usually treat as magic.

AGENDA
18:00 - 18:25: Welcome, registration, networking and refreshments
18:25 - 18:30: Opening remarks and brief speaker introductions
18:30 - 19:10: Samuel Adetunji - Building Performance-Critical Applications in Go: Writing Unsafe Go, Safely
19:10 - 19:20: Audience Q&A with Samuel Adetunji
19:20 - 19:25: Short transition break
19:25 - 20:05: Kumbirai Tanekha – From TAP to curl: Building a Userspace TCP Stack in Go
20:05 - 20:15: Audience Q&A with Kumbirai Tanekha
20:15 - 20:20: Closing remarks, community announcements and acknowledgements

We look forward to welcoming everyone for another evening of Go, engineering conversations, learning and community.
A special thank you to Bluetel Solutions for supporting Golang Birmingham by providing the venue and refreshments. Their continued support plays an important role in making our meetups possible.