Last night I joined the Go Amsterdam meetup at the JetBrains office in Amsterdam — doors at 17:30, talks from 18:00, and the usual good conversations in a nearby bar afterwards. The room was full of Gophers from across the city, hosted by Ilija Matoski and Mechiel Lukkien, with sponsorship from WeTransfer, Lightspeed, Simyo, and MessageBird.
Three talks, three very different angles on the language and the craft around it.
Talk 1 — A Deep Dive into the select Statement (Jesús Espino)
Jesús took apart Go’s select statement, the primitive that lets a goroutine wait on multiple channel operations at once. Beyond the syntax, he covered fair random selection, non-blocking default, timer leaks with time.After, disabling cases with nil channels, and cancelling cleanly with context. The throughline: most “stuck goroutine / climbing memory” bugs trace back to a select with no way out. Full notes here.
Talk 2 — The Curious Case of the Missing Memory (Mohammed Nafees)
Mohammed walked through a forensic memory investigation: a process reporting far more memory than the heap profile suggests. He separated what the Go GC tracks from what the OS sees, covered retention, cgo/off-heap allocations, goroutine stacks, and showed a concrete toolkit (pprof heap vs RSS, gctrace, goroutine profiles) for finding the real cause. Full notes here.
Talk 3 — How to Stay Passionate in Tech in the Age of AI (Ainsley Clark)
Ainsley closed with the human question: when AI writes more of the code, why stay in it? Her answer was that the tool changes the shape of the work, not its worth — protect what you love, build in community, measure growth over output, and stay curious about how the tools actually fail. Full notes here.
Why These Meetups Matter
What makes the Amsterdam Go community worth showing up for is the mix: hard concurrency detail, pragmatic debugging, and honest career reflection, all in one evening. If you write Go and you are in the city, the #amsterdam channel on the gophers Slack is where the next one gets organized.
Related Content
- The Go Programming Language: a practical guide
- Go Meetup Amsterdam: A Deep Dive into the select Statement
- Go Meetup Amsterdam: The Curious Case of the Missing Memory
- Go Meetup Amsterdam: Staying Passionate in Tech in the Age of AI
