In the earlier lessons, the illustrations are by Olga Shalakhina. However, we lost contact while I was reworking the first four chapters into twenty short lessons. After Roger Peppé joined as coauthor and we were finally ready for more illustrations, Olga was too busy to work on it. That's when Erick Zelaya stepped in as illustrator.
In lesson 24 there is an martian and a laser gun. The martian says "nack nack" while the laser says "pew pew". Both adhere to a talker interface, so it's possible to make both shout, even though they are different types. For a more thorough explanation, see lesson 24 of the book.
Of the illustrations by Erick Zelaya, the martian is his favourite. Knowing that Erick would be in Denver for GopherCon, I wanted to do something to say thank you. Here's a photo of Erick with the cake based on his illustration.
I didn't know how to surprise Erick, but Bill Kennedy shared an idea. Last year at GopherCon, Valhalla Cakes made a gopher birthday cake for the wonderful Ashley McNamara. Sadly I missed the occasion, but the idea was there. I was put in contact with Sam of Valhalla Cakes to order a cake. Then I reached out to Erick's wife Jamilet to find out what flavour Erick would like. From there, the ladies at convention designs picked up the cake, and took care of everything.
This is a photo of me with Erick. I like how the lights on the ceiling look vaguely like UFOs.
Then it came time to cut the cake and serve delicious "gopher brains" to anyone who was around. I had scheduled a tweet for 10 a.m. and dropped the tweet into the #gophercon Slack channel.
It was a really fun surprise for Erick and a great way to celebrate the launch of Get Programming with Go. Thanks to everyone who made it happen!
Photo credit: some photos by Francesc Campoy Flores and Brian Ketlesen.
P.S. It's true that I gave up cake and other sweets over two years ago, so I didn't have any martian gopher cake, but it was still a lot of fun to see.