GopherCon 2026: Hidden Flags, Durable Agents, and Bringing the Community Together

What a week. GopherCon 2026 took over the Seattle Convention Center the first week of August, and as identical twins who both live and breathe Go, we walked away with sore feet, a full camera roll, and a reminder of why this community is our favorite place to be.

We're Cassie Coyle and Sam Kendziora, both senior software engineers at Diagrid, and for us the best part of any GopherCon happens away from the slides. It's standing in the convention center hearing what other gophers are building, and this year did not disappoint.

Capture the Flag: durable agents and a hidden flag

Diagrid came to Seattle as a sponsor, and instead of a traditional booth we set up in the Capture the Flag area — a room packed with tables and, hands down, the best decor at the conference (a full Jurassic Park theme that we're still not over). Our challenge fit right in: get a durable Go agent to connect to our hosted MCP server running in a VM, call the tools it exposed, and retrieve a set of flags — including one hidden flag that took a little more digging to find.

It was so much fun watching people work through it. Attendees wired up their agents, discovered the MCP tools, watched their agent invoke them and pull back results — all durable, all in Go, using Diagrid Catalyst. The hidden flag turned into a friendly competition, and more than a few people had that great "wait, I didn't know it could do that" moment when they saw a Go agent survive a restart and still finish its task. If you found the hidden flag, nicely done!

Two talks — and a twin bookend

Between the two of us, we ended up bookending the technical program, which we thought was pretty fun.

Cassie opened things up as the first talk right after the keynotes with a packed room on Wednesday, August 5th, with Go and I Save the Bees. It's a working beekeeping intelligence platform built with Go, open-source tooling, and AI — running on real hives, generating AI-powered inspection reports, classifying bee temperament from audio, and even supporting an agricultural tax exemption. Not a toy demo: durable workflows for reliable background processing, activities that cleanly wrap AI vision and audio APIs, and IoT integrations that fire real-time alerts (like catching a captured swarm from a sudden weight delta on a hive scale). The domain changes, but the architecture doesn't. Attendees walked away having learned a little about beekeeping — and a lot about the systems they already build every day.

Sam closed out Thursday, August 6th, as the last talk of the conference before the Go team's panel with Building a Durable Agent & MCP Execution Engine in Go. Most agentic frameworks aren't durable — if the process crashes mid tool call, execution is lost and the agent starts over. Sam dug into the building blocks that fix that in Go: deterministic replay, checkpoint-based resumption, the Virtual Actor pattern, and a built-in MCP durability worker that can survive the long pauses MCP introduces (elicitation and sampling can suspend a call for minutes before it resumes). The takeaway: what durable execution actually looks like in Go, and why it's the right foundation for running agents in production.

Getting to go first and last, as identical twin sisters, was a little surreal — and a lot of fun! Under the hood, both projects run on the same foundation: Diagrid Catalyst, our managed offering. It's where the durable workflows and agents you saw in both talks actually live — so you can hit the ground running with durable Go agents without standing up or managing any of the infrastructure yourself.

Bringing the community together

Throughout the conference, the two of us both presented, supported the Challenge Series, and also hosted two community gatherings this year.

On day one, we kicked off the conference by hosting the Women Who Go Meetup — a chance to gather, connect, and set a warm, welcoming tone before things really got going. There's something special about opening the week surrounded by people working to make this community more inclusive, and getting to do it side by side as sisters made it even better.

On day two, we hosted the Meetup for Meetup Organizers — the people who quietly keep local Go communities alive all year long. Swapping stories about what works, what's hard, and how to keep showing up for our local gophers was genuinely energizing, and we left with a notebook full of ideas.

A few things we took home

In-person still wins. No Slack thread replaces catching someone at a CTF table and going deep on their actual system. The best feedback we got on durable agents came from unscripted conversations.

People are hungry for reliable AI. The excitement wasn't "AI agents" in the abstract — it was "how do I make this thing not fall over in production." Durability and Go turned out to be exactly the conversation people wanted to have.

Community is a team sport. Hosting two gatherings reminded us how much invisible work goes into these events, and how much it pays off in the connections that come out of them.

Thank you

To everyone who tried the challenge, sat in on our talks, showed up to a meetup, or just stopped to chat along the way — thank you! That's the reason we keep coming back and have been attending GopherCon since 2019. Getting to experience it together, as twins and as part of this community, is something we don't take for granted.

See you at the next one.

Didn't get to play? The CTF is still live

Couldn't make it to Seattle — or want another crack at that hidden flag in the Challenge Series?

Good news: we're leaving the VM up hosting our MCP server through Friday, August 28, 2026 so more folks can run the challenge on their own time.

Here's the mission: point a durable Go agent at our hosted MCP server, discover the tools it exposes, and have your agent call them to capture the flags — including the one secret flag that's hiding a little deeper. It's a genuinely fun way to see durable execution in action: crash your agent mid-run and watch it pick right back up where it left off instead of starting over.

Grab a few minutes before August 28th and give it a go. If you snag the secret flag, we'd love to hear about it — come find us online.

Want to try the durable agent + MCP setup yourself? Check out Diagrid Catalyst. And if you organize a local Go meetup, come say hi — we'd love to trade notes.