Three weeks ago, I attended my first Golang meetup in Munich. The meetup was organised by @munich_gophers for the Go 1.8 release party. It was a very nice experience. I really liked the idea of being at a place where all the attendees share the same interest. Unfortunately, in my home country (Egypt) we don’t have a Go meetup group. I got so excited that I decided I will start one myself.

Go is not that famous in Egypt. We don’t have a strong community. If I want to start a meetup, I need first to build the community. What I had in mind is to host a workshop where I will give an introduction about Go, prepare some problems for the attendees to solve with Go to make them familiar with the language and let them read and try to solve the problems on there own. To make the workshop more fun, I decided to build Godge (https://github.com/MohamedBassem/godge).

Godge is a self-hosted container-based online judge for meetups and workshops. Other online judges let you only test the output of a submission. Godge is different. It lets you test whatever you want. You can pass command line flags to the submission, send HTTP requests to a web server submission or do whatever you want. You define the tasks you want your attendees to solve, start the server and let the attendees submit their solutions. Godge will evaluate the submission and show the result on a scoreboard. The scoreboard is then projected on the screen throughout the whole workshop and attendees will compete to pass all the tasks.

I prepared a live demo of Godge here :

To know how it works and how to use it in your own meetups check the github repo : https://github.com/MohamedBassem/godge.

I’m still planning the meetup, and will let you know how it works.