A personal thanks from me to the Go community, and from @CuratedGo to everyone who writes blog posts about our awesome language

<p>I just wanted a chance to say a long-form thanks (yes, even 280 chars isn&#39;t enough) to the Go community for helping me get @CuratedGo up to over 3,000 followers this year.</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/CuratedGo">https://twitter.com/CuratedGo</a></li> </ul> <p>What follows is a short account of how I had no idea what I was getting myself in for when starting the account, nor how much time it would take to keep things going. There might be a couple of lessons in here which could be useful to anyone thinking of doing something similar (I&#39;d encourage it), or perhaps everyone already knows this already and that&#39;s fine too. However it was definitely all new to me.</p> <p>When I started the account back in Sep 2016 I wouldn&#39;t have guessed there would be 1,000 followers by January. I still attribute that achievement to the awesome Brian Ketelsen for retweeting and promoting my initial tweets which got me to over 100 followers overnight and around 250 followers within a few days. (Side note: he&#39;s told me via a DM I don&#39;t need to say thanks anymore, so consider this the last <em>public</em> display of thanks, on a very personal level.)</p> <p>Getting to 1,000 followers in January was a huge boost to carry on doing what I was doing and I never expected I&#39;d still be here now, especially with as many followers as it has. Whilst it is hard work looking for great articles and posting them regularly, it has definitely been worth it because of everyone who likes, retweets or replies to them. But ... later on I&#39;ll note how this in itself doesn&#39;t always keep the motivation going.</p> <p>Even though my aim was for 4,000 followers by the end of the year, I went through a quiet patch around Aug-Sep where I hardly tweeted at all despite my goal of 1-3 articles per day. Yes I was tired, over everything, and not in a great space (I&#39;m alright now, nothing major, just down for a while) but that period made me question what I was doing it all for.</p> <p>This was when I realised that self-motivation is the key to all of this, whether it is coding, creating packages or apps, reading articles, tweeting about them, or interacting with other members of the community, you need to have that personal satisfaction from what you&#39;re doing rather than any external stimulation and gamification from Twitter (likes, retweets, and follows being the adrenaline rushes supposed to keep us enthralled with every new mobile notification).</p> <p>The next factor at that point is momentum. Not writing Go, not reading articles, not filtering them for the account, and not tweeting means it is pretty hard to get all of it back on track and get going again I blame these two months for failing to get up to my target this year - but I&#39;m okay with that. Since then I have created a small app to help me keep the articles coming and has made my passion for linking to great articles a little easier to keep up with.</p> <p>So ignore the follower count. Ignore the phone&#39;s vibrations. Ignore the emails from Twitter or otherwise telling you someone you follow liked an unrelated tweet from someone you don&#39;t follow that you&#39;ve never heard of before(!).</p> <p>Instead, do it for the self-satisfaction of knowing that you&#39;re helping the Go community learn more, especially people new to the language and ecosystem.</p> <p>Whilst I don&#39;t think I have hit those lofty goals with the account, I do believe that my reason for starting it was because there was a gap that needed to be filled. At the time (ignoring auto-retweeting bots) there were too many accounts that just gather all links they can possibly find and post them again, and again, and again, without much thought for the content or frequency.</p> <p>I&#39;m hoping, even though I tweet sporadically at times, it&#39;s still the only account which tweets when there is something <em>interesting</em> there and not <em>just</em> because it&#39;s there. I hope you can see this too and if so, then I&#39;ve succeeded in my objective.</p> <p>It&#39;s not the fact that the account has over 3,000 followers, nor that I wanted 4,000. It&#39;s the fact that someone out there figured out why they shouldn&#39;t use buffered channels for their use-case, that a switch went off in their head when they read &#34;interface{} says nothing&#34; for the first time, or that they found &#34;json-to-go&#34; (thanks Matt Holt) to help them - all because they read an article that a Gopher out there decided to write about our favourite language and share their knowledge and findings with the world.</p> <p>So thank you, thank you to those people writing articles or blog posts about Go. CuratedGo wouldn&#39;t be able to surface any of it if it wasn&#39;t there in the first place. It wouldn&#39;t be what it is without all of that material at hand. And whilst some people think blog posts are unfashionable or that social media has taken over, I&#39;m a firm believer that only those long-form articles, with gotchyers and code examples, all from personal experience can show the true depth of the very capable language we have in our hands.</p> <hr/>**评论：**<br/><br/>trinitri3: <pre><p>Have you been drinking?</p></pre>