The Go programming language was a major focus of GopherCon AU, with talks covering various aspects of the language and its ecosystem. The conference featured international speakers, including Russ Cox and Rob Pike, who discussed topics such as testing, coroutines, and the challenges of implementing interfaces in type parameters. Additionally, there were talks on the implementation and design of Evy, a visual programming language, and scaling code search engines using compression techniques inspired by bloom filters. The conference highlighted the importance of software engineering being a combination of managing programming and time, with testing playing a central role in making this work at scale. It also emphasized the need for collaboration and finding the right people to convince one's ideas are worthwhile.