There's no special method - the introduction of Go was incremental. If I remember correctly the monitoring collection component (mentioned in the blog post) was the first. It was small, easy to swap in and easy to demonstrate the improvements.
You build trust in the technology and work flow before moving on to larger more critical/risky projects.
(Andy is very much missed by his former colleagues)
There was a requirement for high volume/through put messaging component in our infrastructure.
That technological requirement (along with non functional requirements e.g. development time/costs) was more than adequately met by a program(s) written by a team member written in Go. Was it an opportunity to further explore the "new hotness" that is/was Go…absolutely but the solution could have been implemented in one of the other supported technologies C/C++/Java with appropriate advantages/disadvantages associated with each. It will stay in use for as long as it provides the best solution, if that changes a more appropriate solution will be investigated.
> 'This guy re-wrote all our stuff in the new hotness then left the company'
The Go dataStore is "a" component within a large infrastructure, it is supportable by more than one member of the development team (a core requirement when deploying any new technology to production).
I'll also note that before Andy left, being a professional and thoughtful colleague, he put a lot of effort into ensuring appropriate training and knowledge was given to team members that had not been part of the deployment.
As Andy is a very well regarded former colleague, it helps that we could easily get in touch for a query, even when we're out for a beer or five* :)
(*five might not be a maximum in that scenario)
If the result was just one component out of many written in Go then the reality is it was a side-experiment and/or a poor management decision. I do hope that is not the case.
"Andy is very much missed by his former colleagues" hopefully for good reasons, not because they left him with another language and toolchain to maintain :)
I also agree that you don't need to hire new devs. I've taken two programmers who've never used Go (mostly university languages) and taught them to be productive in a matter of days. Both consider Go to be one of their favorite languages.
