Meet Google's Crack Team Of Bad Code Killers: The Gophers

When you work at one of the most advanced, forward-thinking technology companies in the world and something just doesn't work the way it should, who do you call?

At Google, you bring in the gophers.

According to Klint Finley at Wired, the "gopher team" is a group of about 25 hotshots at Google who go around the company, volunteering on different projects that need assistance in making things run faster and more efficiently.

What enables them to jump around like this is their use of the Go programming language.

Designed by some of the brightest minds at Google to be faster, require less computing power, and easier for coders to work with than the tech that was originally used to build Google's infrastructure, Go has allowed the gopher team to improve the software powering Google Search, the Chrome Web browser, and the infrastructure that lets millions of users download huge amounts of data from Google every day.

While it started as a project that only Google would use, the gopher team made Go available to the public back in 2009. Since then, it had started to gain serious attention. Derek Collison, the former CTO at VMWare, said that he thinks Go is going to take over the cloud in an interview with Wired earlier this year:

“The management layers and infrastructure layers of the newer technologies that provide this cloud delivery model? Within two years, a majority will be written in Go.”