Conference information
My talk
Goroutines and Cells: Lessons in Goal-Directed Systems
Agenda (Carlisia Campos) | GopherCon 2025
This talk explores a new way to approach concurrency in Go by drawing inspiration from bioelectric signaling in cells. It contrasts how biological systems achieve scalable, decentralized coordination with traditional concurrency patterns such as worker pools and fixed-rate limiters, which often struggle to adapt to dynamic workloads.
Biological systems use graded communication, rhythmic synchronization, and localized interactions to coordinate without centralized control. By applying these principles to Go concurrency, developers can design adaptive, nature-inspired systems that improve efficiency, fault tolerance, and self-organization.
Through conceptual models and real-world analogies, this talk will illustrate:
How graded signaling enables dynamic resource allocation, reducing bottlenecks in goroutine coordination How rhythmic synchronization helps orchestrate periodic tasks more efficiently than independent timers How decentralized interactions lead to emergent consensus without centralized control Attendees will leave with new mental models for designing concurrent systems, gaining insights into how nature-inspired approaches can make Go applications more resilient and scalable.
Talk/Attendee Level: Intermediate/Advanced