Golang Birmingham - 17th April 2025 - BJSS

## Details

📢 Golang Birmingham Meetup!
🗓️ Date: Thursday, 17th April 2025
📍 Location: BJSS Birmingham, Somerset House, 37 Temple Street, B2 5DP

We are thrilled to announce our next meetup for all Go enthusiasts in and around Birmingham. Whether you're a seasoned pro, just getting started, or anywhere in between, we invite you to join us for an evening of learning, sharing, and networking.

🔍 Agenda:

• 17:30 - 18:00 - Registration, networking & settling in
• 18:10 - 18:40 - Jamie Tanna - Quantifying your reliance on Open Source software"
• 18:40 - 19:00 - Pizza break!
• 19:30 - 20:00 Sam Burns - "The Strengths of the 'weak' Package"
• 20:30 - 21:00 - Paul Dragoonis - "CI/CD Reimagined: Building Portable, Composable Pipelines with Dagger"
• 21:00 onwards - Networking and mingling

About our speakers and their talks:

Jamie Tanna:
Jamie Tanna (he/him) is a Senior Software Engineer, passionate advocate for Open Source, and avid blogger about tech and life. Jamie's spent the last few years working on improving the usage of internal libraries and Open Source across the organisations he's been part of, leading him to building some tooling to make it easier in an Open Source first manner.
I've always been interested in the composition of Open Source and internal dependencies that my projects use, and after years of wanting some way to query the data, I went ahead and built it!

Having access to this data has allowed me and my team to get a view of what our most popular languages or frameworks are, which packages we didn't realise we so heavily rely on, determine how many dependencies are using end-of-life software, or just understand the way that internally-built libraries are used across the organisation.

This data has given my company's developers, leadership and the security team a better view of the landscape of our ever growing dependencies on Open Source, so we can appropriately upgrade, migrate, and support projects.

In this talk, you'll learn that it's straightforward to do this yourself with Free and Open Source Software, as well as looking at some examples of the data that you can get out of this tooling for your own purposes."

Sam Burns:
Sam Burns is a developer, software architect, and application security researcher.

"Go 1.24, released in Feb '25, adds the new 'weak' package to the standard library. The package brings weak pointers to the language for the first time. These lightweight references allow developers to manage memory more efficiently, allowing garbage collection of variables even when referenced.

With weak pointers, you can write more memory-efficient caching, track values with observers without preventing their cleanup, and build powerful data structures such as canonicalisation maps. As with similar features in C++ and other languages, we can learn to navigate the quirks of this new item in the Go developer's toolbox.

Join us for an overview of the anatomy of the 'weak' package, and to discover how weak pointers can help you write memory-efficient Go."

Paul Dragoonis
Tired of fighting your CI/CD? Build pipelines like real software.

Dagger is a next-gen CI/CD engine that lets you define pipelines in code—using Go, Python, TypeScript, and more. It brings portability, modularity, and local-first development to your delivery workflows. No more brittle YAML, no more environment drift.

In this talk, you’ll see how Dagger fits into your stack, supercharges your existing CI, and helps you ship faster—with fewer hacks and more control."

Why attend?

• Expand your network and connect with fellow Golang professionals.
• Learn about the latest tools, best practices, and innovations in the industry.
• Share your own experiences and challenges.

For more details or if you'd like to present, please contact James@techmids.io.

We can't wait to see you all there!