A packed schedule of talks, workshops, and social events

Conference Schedule

For GopherCon UK 2025, we’ve assembled a diverse line-up of industry experts who will share their extensive knowledge and experience in Go programming. Our carefully selected speakers will provide a broad range of insights to deepen your understanding and expertise in the language.

09.15
Keynote
Go Security – Past, Present, and Future
09.15Porter Tun
Roland Shoemaker
Roland ShoemakerGo Security Team LeadGoogle
Despite its 15 year history, Go has had a rather uneventful security history. Let’s talk about why that is, some of the mistakes we did make and what they taught us, what we’re working on now, and what’s on the horizon to make Go an even better, safer language for the next 15 years.

09.45
Room Change
09.45

10.00
Talk
What's coming in Go 1.25
10.00Porter Tun
Daniel Marti
Daniel MartiCUE maintainer, Go contributor

A technical overview of the changes to the Go language, toolchain, and standard library coming in Go 1.25, to be released in early August. G...

Show more
Talk
Climbing the Testing Pyramid: From Real Service to Interface Mocks in Go
10.00Queen Charlotte
Naveen Ramanathan
Naveen RamanathanSoftware EngineerJP Morgan

This talk explores the various strategies for unit testing Go applications that interact with external services like S3.Testing against real extern...

Show more
Tutorial
Building a framework for reliable data migrations in Go
10.00King Vault
Bruno Scheufler
Bruno ScheuflerSenior Distributed Systems Engineerinngest

As products evolve over time, new requirements are translated into features and supporting infrastructure. This often requires data stores to adapt...

Show more
11:00
Morning Break
11:00Brewery Foyer & King George

11.30
Talk
A Gopher's Guide to *NIX Plumbing
11.30Porter Tun
Eleanor McHugh
Eleanor McHugh

Are you writing Go programs that run on Linux or MacOS? Then you're writing Go programs for a UNIX environment! But how much does that figure in yo...

Show more
Talk
The Quest for Speed: Journey to 50% Better P99 Times with Go
11.30Queen Charlotte
David Vella
David VellaSenior Software Engineerloveholidays

Join the LoveHolidays engineering team as we dive deep into our performance optimization journey that cut P99 response times in half. We'll walk th...

Show more
Tutorial
Building a framework for reliable data migrations in Go (continued)
11.30King Vault
Bruno Scheufler
Bruno ScheuflerSenior Distributed Systems Engineerinngest

As products evolve over time, new requirements are translated into features and supporting infrastructure. This often requires data stores to adapt...

Show more
12.30
Lunch
12.30Brewery Foyer & King George
Lunch will be served in the exhibition hall where you will also be able to network with fellow delegates and our sponsors.

14.00
Talk
Opening high traffic access points using Go
14.00Porter Tun
George Kampanos
George KampanosSoftware EngineerNandos

A year ago, a good friend of mine asked me to help him with his gym's member management system. For a small gym (~1000 members), the set of problem...

Show more
Talk
The Strengths of the `weak` Package: Weak Pointers Arrive in Go
14.00Queen Charlotte
Sam Burns
Sam BurnsDeveloper, software architect, and application security researcher

The arrival of the `weak` package to the Go standard library in 2025 brings weak pointers to the language for the first time. These lightweight ref...

Show more
Tutorial
Code Generation for 10x productivity - no AI
14.00King Vault
Andrea Medda Campus
Andrea Medda CampusFounding Engineer

AI is everywhere nowadays... is it the only tool at our disposal to boost productivity? What's out there to help Gophers in a more concrete way?...

Show more
15:00
Room Change
15:00

15.15
Talk
Deep dive into the sync package
15.15Porter Tun
Jesús Espino
Jesús EspinoGitpod

One of the coolest features of Go is goroutines, and the fact that concurrency is part of the language. But concurrency normally requires synchroni...

Show more
Talk
The Right Kind of Abstraction
15.15Queen Charlotte
John Cinnamond
John CinnamondSenior EngineerCrowdstrike

As a community, Go programmers are often suspicious of abstractions preferring to write explicit implementations wherever possible, even if those a...

Show more
Talk
Code Generation for 10x productivity - no AI (continued)
15.15King Vault
Andrea Medda Campus
Andrea Medda CampusFounding Engineer

AI is everywhere nowadays... is it the only tool at our disposal to boost productivity? What's out there to help Gophers in a more concrete way?...

Show more
16.15
Afternoon Break
16.15Brewery Foyer & King George
The afternoon break will be served in the exhibition hall where you will also be able to network with fellow delegates and our sponsors.

16.45
Keynote
Hello, MCP World!
16.45Porter Tun
Daniela Petruzalek
Daniela PetruzalekGoogle
In this talk, we'll explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its mission to standardize how our applications communicate with large language models. We’ll start by exploring the core components you need to get a client and server talking to each other, the types of transport and the different building blocks including tools, prompts and resources. From there, we’ll dive into practical use cases, showing how MCP is already making an impact in AI coding and writing. Finally, we'll explore how the Go ecosystem is embracing this protocol to enable both robust MCP development and a new generation of coding experiences

09.15
Keynote
When Failure Is Not an Option: Surviving Cloud Outages in Go
09.15Porter Tun
Kevin Holditch
Kevin HolditchVP of EngineeringForm3

What does it take to run a real-time payment platform that never sleeps—even when your cloud provider does? In this talk, we’ll take you inside Form3’s journey from a single-cloud AWS setup running Java and managed services, to a next-generation, cloud-agnostic, active/active/active architecture spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure—all powered by Go.

You’ll hear how signing a tier-1 bank forced us to rethink everything: 10x performance targets, financial-grade SLAs, and the UK regulator’s demand for zero cloud lock-in. We’ll dive into how we designed our v2 platform using Kubernetes, CockroachDB, and NATS to achieve unprecedented levels of availability and portability—and how we now run disaster recovery tests in production by intentionally taking out an entire cloud provider for 24 hours with no customer impact.

If you’ve ever wondered whether multi-cloud is a myth or magic, this talk will show you how Form3 makes it real—every day, at scale, in Go.


09.45
Room Change
09.45

10.00
Talk
A Gopher's Guide to Vibe Coding
10.00Porter Tun
Daniela Petruzalek
Daniela PetruzalekDeveloper Relations EngineerGoogle

As vibe coding quickly becomes the new buzzword we Gophers could not be left out of this party. In this talk I'm going to share my experiences whil...

Show more
Talk
K8s CPU Limits Deconstructed
10.00Queen Charlotte
Bill Kennedy
Bill KennedyManaging PartnerArdan Labs

In this talk, Bill will explain how setting CPU limits in K8s can affect your software’s performance. He will use Go as the case study and share ho...

Show more
Tutorial
What story does your dependency tree tell you about your org?
10.00King Vault
Jamie Tanna
Jamie TannaChief Blogger and Open Sourcererelastic

If you're building (internal) tooling, but don't know if your customers are using it, is it worth it? What about spending time building support for...

Show more
11:00
Morning Break
11:00Brewery Foyer & King George

11.30
Talk
Swiss Maps in Go
11.30Porter Tun
Bryan Boreham
Bryan BorehamGrafana Labs

Did you know that the 'map' type has a whole new implementation as of Go 1.24? Originally created in 2016 as a C++ library, Swiss Map uses i...

Show more
Talk
Go Module Hygiene: Keeping go.sum and go.mod in check
11.30Queen Charlotte
Emily Achieng
Emily AchiengDevOps + Software Engineer

The go.mod and go.sum files are the unsung heroes of your Go projects, quietly ensuring dependency consistency, security, and build reliability. Howev...

Show more
Tutorial
What story does your dependency tree tell you about your org (continued)
11.30King Vault
Jamie Tanna
Jamie TannaChief Blogger and Open Sourcererelastic

If you're building (internal) tooling, but don't know if your customers are using it, is it worth it? What about spending time building support for...

Show more
12.30
Lunch
12.30Brewery Foyer & King George
Lunch will be served in the exhibition hall where you will also be able to network with fellow delegates and our sponsors.

14.00
Talk
How Just Eat uses tooling to deploy Go micro-services in minutes
14.00Porter Tun
Ainsley Clark
Ainsley ClarkSenior Software EngineerJust Eat

At Just Eat, we process millions of orders every day, integrating with hundreds of partners. Scaling our systems has been challenging, so we built ...

Show more
Talk
Observability made painless: Go, Otel & LGTM stack
14.00Queen Charlotte
Haseeb Majid
Haseeb MajidBackend software engineer

Transform your Go web service and instrument it using OpenTelemetry and the LGTM stack. Learn why observability is critical in microservices and ho...

Show more
Tutorial
Building Decentralized Applications in Go with Gno.land
14.00King Vault
Antoine Eddi
Antoine EddiR&D Engineer Gnoland

Explore the future of decentralized development in this hands-on workshop! Designed for developers of all levels, this session will introduce you to G...

Show more
15:00
Room Change
15:00

15.15
Talk
Unleashing the Go Toolchain
15.15Porter Tun
Kemal Akkoyun
Kemal AkkoyunStaff Software EngineerDatadog

The -toolexec flag hides a super-power in the Go toolchain: it lets you turn every go build into a programmable pipeline. In this session we’ll rev...

Show more
Talk
Deep dive into a go binary
15.15Queen Charlotte
Jesús Espino
Jesús EspinoSenior Software EngineerGitpod

Whenever you compile a program in Go, it generates a binary that contains your program, but... what is there? Of course there the compiled version ...

Show more
Talk
Building Decentralized Applications in Go with Gno.land (continued)
15.15King Vault
Antoine Eddi
Antoine EddiR&D Engineer Gnoland

Explore the future of decentralized development in this hands-on workshop! Designed for developers of all levels, this session will introduce you to G...

Show more
16.15
Afternoon Break
16.15Brewery Foyer & King George
The afternoon break will be served in the exhibition hall where you will also be able to network with fellow delegates and our sponsors.

16.45
Keynote
Building a coding agent from scratch
16.45Porter Tun
Bill Kennedy
Bill KennedyManaging PartnerArdan Labs
In this talk, Bill will share how AI agents fundamental work and interact with LLMs to perform basic tasks like listing, reading, and editing files. During the talk, Bill will live code an agent and explain all the parts of the code needed to make this work. Bill will do this using Ollama and the gpt-oss model that supports both reasoning and tool calling.

Stay up-to-date with GopherCon UK

Enter your email address to join the GopherCon UK mailing list and be the first to hear our latest news and announcements.

gopher