The layout to use is indeed "2006-01-02T15:04:05.000Z
" described in RickyA's answer.
It isn't "the time of the first commit of go", but rather a mnemonic way to remember said layout.
See pkg/time:
The reference time used in the layouts is:
Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006
which is Unix time
1136239445
.
Since MST is GMT-0700, the reference time can be thought of as
01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700
(1,2,3,4,5,6,7, provided you remember that 1 is for the month, and 2 for the day, which is not easy for an European like myself, used to the day-month date format)
As illustrated in "time.parse : why does golang parses the time incorrectly?", that layout (using 1,2,3,4,5,6,7) must be respected exactly.