Building Bridges to GopherCon 2018

Ashley Willis (McNamara)
6 min readMar 15, 2018

It’s no secret that I love Go and every year the Go community comes together for an event known as GopherCon — Making it’s debut in 2014 it was an instant success! It drew a sellout crowd of 700 attendees and has more than doubled in size since then.

Not only is there an exceptional line up of pre-conference workshops taught by some of the best in the industry, but they also put a lot of care into selecting the best speakers for the event. Plus the hours upon hours of networking — it’s really worth the trip!

This year GopherCon celebrates it’s five-year anniversary which is kind of a big deal, but as a single mother I fully understand that attending a conference is a luxury that not everyone has, so this year I am making it my mission to bring as many people to GopherCon as I can.

I’ll be doing a series of fundraisers starting now and ending on July 1st. The goal is to raise money for GoBridge and WomenWhoGo — two organizations who make it their mission to educate & empower underrepresented communities.

Daniela Petruzalek is one of the many Women Who Go Diversity Scholarship reciepents from 2017 and she wrote about her experience in a post titled; The Impact of Women Who Go in my LifeI highly reccommend taking the time to read it.

In the last 3 days we’ve sold 413 shirts, raising $4,345.42 which is just incredible! You Gophers make me so proud. Remember, these donations don’t just buy someone a ticket to the event, it’s a FULL-RIDE so the more money we raise the better!

I’ll continue to update this post as I add designs, but feel free to browse the Threadless shop HERE

Gophers Hugging

Inclusion Gophers

Mic Drop Gopher

This is Fine Gopher

Women Who Go

New Additions:

Lazy Gopher

Space Gopher

Facepalm Gopher

Gopher and Docker

Father & Daughter Gophers

Mother & Child Gopher

The NEW Doctor!

Go bug or feature?

GoBuild

When it’s broken and you don’t know why…

Fly Away with me Gopher

Fly Away with Me Gopher (Blue)

Gaming Gopher

Wonder Woman Gopher

Gopher Unicorn

Gopher Pride (Gaypher)

Gopher Link

The Doctor

BatGopher

Belgium Gopher

Denver Gopher

Chicago Gopher

GopherCon Iceland

GoBuffalo

Safari Gophers

Edward

Music Producer (Splice)

Nerdy Gopher

Rick and Gopher

Gopher Moto

Gopher Lion

Gopher Strange

Go Mentor

Gopher Snacks

Go Packages

Gophers in France

Gopher Band

Go Race

Kubernetes Gophers

Vintage Gopher

Viking Gopher

StayPuft Gopher

Go Community

Gopher Cowboy

Gopher Academy

Original Go Buffalo

CNCF Gophers

Star Gophers

Gopher Wars

MSFT Gophers

Thank you again from the bottom of my heart and keep checking back!

Have a favorite Gopher? Leave a comment and I’ll try to work it into a future campaign.

If you don’t want a shirt you can donate directly to Women Who Go or if you would like to purchase shirts for us to give away then you can send money directly to me and I’ll order the shirts in your name, but please leave your email in the notes.

Based on original artwork from the amazing Renee French.

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Ashley Willis (McNamara)
Ashley Willis (McNamara)

Written by Ashley Willis (McNamara)

Director of Developer Relations @GitHub ❤ For speaking requests: speaking@ashley.dev

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