Join members of #include<C++> for a celebration dinner on the evening of Wednesday, September 18th. Meet other attendees who value inclusion and diversity, and network with some of the most influential members of the C++ community. If you are alone at the conference, be sure to come to the dinner to meet people and feel more connected. If you’re “the only one” from your team come and connect to a larger group and share advice and support.

After a buffet dinner there will be a panel discussion moderated by Kate Gregory, and then there will be more time to strengthen friendships and learn from each other. It will be a special evening – please be part of it!

Note: if cost is an issue for you, please contact #include<C++> to apply for a scholarship to the dinner. Limited numbers are available. If you are able to contribute to the scholarship fund and ensure another attendee is able to benefit from the dinner, they’d love to hear from you, too.

(This option was added to registration late, so attendees that registered early might have missed it. Since it is a stand-alone registration option, just register again selecting only this item.)

You can register here.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to bring you some great interviews with CppCon 2019 presenters, conducted by our own Kevin Carpenter.  Each one is a quick look at what you can expect from their talk.

This week we’re pleased to introduce Clare Macrae, with a sneak peak at her talk, Quickly Testing Legacy C++ Code with Approval Tests. Clare describes how Approval Tests can help you get coverage for your legacy code.

Kevin also brings us Eric Niebler and David Hollman discussing their upcoming talk, A Unifying Abstraction for Async in C++.

Join us each Monday for another set of presenter interviews.

The program for CppCon 2019 is now live!

We’ll have almost 150 regular sessions delivered by the best C++ presenters in the industry, many returning from previous years as well as some exciting new voices. We’ll have seven or eight concurrent tracks full of sessions containing C++ best practices and what you need to know about C++17 and even what is planned for C++20, including one track devoted to Back to Basics talks.

In addition to the main program, we’ll have panels, lightning talks, Open Content talks, BOFs, author signings, exhibitors, standards committee meetings, community social events, workshops, classes, and some awesome headline speakers.

Most of the program is published, but we are still working a few things, like categorizing talks and a few surprises, so keep checking back.

We’d like to thank the Program Committee, our speakers, and the many professionals who proposed talks which we, unfortunately, just couldn’t squeeze in this year. Thank you for your hard work and enthusiastic support for this year’s program!

If you aren’t certain that you want to join us in Aurora this September, watch the attendee video from last year!

If you recognize someone you know, let them know that you’ll see them in September.

We are adding a new track to the seven existing tracks that make CppCon the largest C++ conference ever held, every year.

This new track, dubbed the Back to Basics Track, boasts some of today’s top tech trainers. These teachers commit themselves to coming up with classes that make the complicated clear and put the power and performance potential of C++ within the purview of every programmer.

This year the conference received a significantly larger number of session proposals, we’ve moved to a much larger facility, and we set a record for growth in Early Bird registrations, so we felt an increase in content in order.

Attendees want to hear what the standard committee is doing and the conference has always had more than its share of ISO C++ Committee members presenting new library and language features. But attendees also want learn about the tried-and-true and industry best practices.  We set out to create a series of sessions dedicated to:

What every C++ programmer should know about…

We think this is important enough that we are giving this track its own Opening and Closing Keynote addresses by some of our most popular presenters. This year the track features:

Jason Turner	The Best Parts of C++ (Opening Keynote)
Klaus Iglberger	Back to Basics: Move Semantics (2 parts)
Dan Saks	Back to Basics: Const as a Promise
Arthur O’Dwyer	Back to Basics: RAII and the Rule of Zero
Rainer Grimm	Back to Basics: Atomics, Locks, and Tasks (2 parts)
Jon Kalb	Back to Basics: Object-Oriented Programming
Fedor Pikus	Back to Basics: Test-Driven Development
Ben Saks	Back to Basics: Understanding Value Categories

Dan Saks	Back to Basics: Function and Class Templates
Arthur O’Dwyer	Back to Basics: Smart Pointers
Inbal Levi	Back to Basics: Virtual Dispatch and Its Alternatives
Ben Saks	Back to Basics: Exception Handling and Exception Safety
Arthur O’Dwyer	Back to Basics: Lambdas from Scratch
Arthur O’Dwyer	Back to Basics: Type Erasure
Chandler Carruth & Titus Winters	What is C++ (Closing Keynote)

 

Many thanks to Arthur O’Dwyer, Back to Basic Track Chair.

CppCon has five days (nine if you include classes) full of content from 08:00 to 22:00. An event-filled week made up of very long days.

There are twenty classes, a field trip, over seven tracks of breakout sessions, daily plenary talks, BoFs, Open Content sessions, dinners, author signings, a poster competition, podcasts recorded onsite, the conference-swag shop, exhibitors, panels, a bookstore, a day-long ISO C++ Study Group meeting, lightning talks, and a Tool Time session.

All this, but the most important part is, there are over a thousand attendees, including over a hundred speakers, who you want to meet and who want to engage with you.

No one can do it all.

Taking care of you

You’ll get the most out of the conference if you are at your best and staying at your best means getting the quiet time you need. Staying at the Gaylord Rockies makes it possible, during a single breakout session, to slip back to your room, catch a cat nap, and return refreshed for the next session.

Khronos Quiet Rooms

An even nearer and quicker option are the Khronos Quiet Rooms, which will be the perfect place for you to recharge yourself and your devices while reading email, editing slides, fixing bugs, or just relaxing between events. They are not for conversations, either in person or on the phone, nor for listening to anything without headphones, because we want to make certain they are relaxing for other attendees as well.

Join us for fun and games in Denver!

The CppCon 2019 Field Trip will be to Casa Bonita and Hyperspace Arcade.

Spend a fun-filled Sunday afternoon on September 15th, with other CppCon attendees, at the world famous Casa Bonita restaurant for lunch and then free 80’s style arcade games all afternoon at the nearby Hyperspace Arcade.

Casa Bonita is the Mexican restaurant made famous by the South Park episode in which the boys declare that it’s like the Disneyland of Mexican restaurants. The restaurant features a number of different entertainments, such as cliff divers, shows, and a secret hideout.

Hyperspace Arcade features unlimited game play on over one hundred fifty machines including classics and rare titles.

If you are arriving for CppCon 2019 by Sunday morning, this is your opportunity get to know some of your fellow attendees in a fun-filled stress-free environments.

See  the CppCon 2019 Field Trip page for details.

Attendees at last year’s Engage, Entertain, Educate (EEE) workshop wrote to us: “Please rehire!” “Please repeat!” and “You should have this class every year.”

Well, we can’t promise every year, but we are are bringing it back this year as a one-day pre-conference workshop.

This workshop is presented by three of the most widely recognized presenters in the C++ community: Andrei Alexandrescu, John Lakos, and Kate Gregory.

The workshop will combine some lecture (“I like the opening by Andrei, it highlights things we need to look [at in] our talk”) with actual presentation practice (“the breakout where we have to simulate the actual talk was really useful!”).

Whether you are planning to speak at a conference, a local user group, or at your own company, this workshop will help you build the skills and confidence that are key to being a successful technical presenter.

This year we are lowering the class size limit which allows more time for attention from each instructor, but does mean that the class will fill sooner. Don’t miss this opportunity to get individual attention and coaching from some of the best presenters in our community.

Register for this workshop and all the rest of this year’s classes on our Registration Page.

The grand opening of the Gaylord Rockies, CppCon’s new home as of this year, was held this past weekend and they invited your Conference Chair (that would be me) and the team from our event management partners, Krueger Event Management  (that would be Mike and Karen Krueger), along with five hundred other event planners to spend the weekend. This gave the team at the GR (yes, that’s what we call it) a chance to show off the brand new convention center and what they can do with everything from food and beverage to decorating and AV.

The team at our previous home, the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, was great and we don’t expect to ever find a better team, but from what we’ve seen so far, we may have found a team that can match them.

Gaylord convention centers are known for their inspiring atriums and impressive public spaces and the Rockies lives up that reputation. The main atrium is designed in a mountain lodge style with a view that overlooks downtown Denver and the Rockies beyond. This is the center of the public space and is large enough to feature design elements like enormous (faux) boulders and a historic nineteenth century railroad caboose on a train track that goes over a bridge crossing a water feature fed by the indoor waterfall.

This area has plenty of casual seating and also dining tables served by “ski village” food and drink bars. It also connects the three main restaurants (one Asian, one Italian, and a steakhouse) and the sports bar, which seats five hundred and features the largest video screen in Colorado. Well, the largest indoor screen. Apparently, the one at the Bronco’s stadium is bigger.

All of the venue is spacious, modern, and filled with Colorado/Rockies inspired art and decor.

To the left of the atrium, as you enter, is the spa, a huge fitness center, and an indoor/outdoor pool area that features a couple of water slides, one five-stories high, as well as a mile-long “lazy river.” I didn’t pack a swim suit, but I regretted it as soon as we stepped into the pool area. Even for an old guy like me, it looks like a lot of fun. Don’t forget your suit.

To the right of the atrium, is a store for souvenirs and the kinds of things that business travelers sometimes forget to bring and a “grab and go” market with snacks and things like salads and sandwiches. Beyond these is the corridor leading to the convention center which features a Starbucks and the largest FedEx/Kinkos in Colorado.

In our search for a new venue, we weren’t looking for luxury. We were looking for a home that would best accommodate our size and growth (and had good dates available). The Gaylord is a bit up-scale, but the space we are getting is so exciting that we knew it was the best match for our requirements.

We’ll have enough space to seat everyone in one room for plenary sessions (without resorting to an overflow room) for the foreseeable future. We’ll have enough breakout spaces that we can run the seven tracks that we have now and expand in the future with a possible academic track or other options. We’ll have the space to host the standard committee’s Low Latency and Game Developer Study Group (and perhaps other groups) under the same roof.

I don’t want to make a public commitment to anything that isn’t completely locked yet, but just as an example of what we can do with extra meeting space, we are working on a “quiet room.” This is a space with no conversation or phone calls, but with seating and power for charging stations and to work on slides or email. Or to just spend a few minutes of downtime in the middle of a long day.

As excited as I am about the additional meeting space, I’m even more excited about the ample public space. As we were outgrowing the Meydenbauer, we felt the pain first in the public areas. We use public space for the poster competition, exhibitor tables and booths, breaks and lunch concessions, the bookstore and author signings, public seating and whiteboards, registration and the information desk, and charging stations as well as its most important purpose, getting to sessions and talking with other attendees. This won’t be an issue at the GR convention center. As we were walking through the space this weekend, my comment to Karen and Mike was that it was an “embarrassment” of public space. The challenge for us as planners will be to make the best use of it. Not having enough public space won’t be an issue.

One of our top criteria for selecting a venue was finding a place where all attendees could be “under one roof.” Although our previous home at the Meydenbauer Center was a great experience, we weren’t happy about having attendees in half a dozen hotels scattered across Bellevue. We feel that the conference experience will be enhanced by having everyone staying together.

Rooming at the GR will mean more opportunities to meet with other attendees and it will also make attending the conference less stressful. CppCon is packed with content which makes for a long, exhausting week (to nine days with classes). As Kate Gregory suggests, taking an afternoon nap may be a key survival technique. Knowing that your room is just an elevator ride away means you can get a cat nap in while missing only one session. It is also comforting to know that you don’t need to leave the building after attending a lightning talk session that ends at 10pm.

The GR has relaxation/stress reduction options. I personally tested out the spa (the sacrifices I make…) and I can’t think of a better way to relax and reinvigorate during the conference. A few minutes in the pool area would be a close second and that would be free. Did I mention that you should bring your swim suit?

I’m so excited about our new home that I vacillate between wishing it were September already and being overwhelmed with the work ahead of us in the next half year.

A key component of our preparation plan is involving local C++ programmers as much as possible. We are working with the North Denver Metro C++ Meetup group (thank you Jason and Scott), who are excited for us to make our new home near them. They are helping in several ways including working on the field trip (which we teased at the close of last year’s conference) and finding local partners such as an event/portrait photographer and a bookstore we can work with for books sales and author signings.

This last weekend’s trip was very valuable to Karen, Mike, and me because it was our first chance to see the GR, to meet members of the their team, and see them in action. Because it was their grand opening, while we asked a lot of questions, it wasn’t an opportunity for us to sit down with the team and do any serious planning. We’ve set up another visit when we’ll have the team’s undivided attention and can really sit down, roll up our sleeves, and plan for the best use of this marvelous space.

That meeting will be later this month. Karen and I will return and in addition to the GR team, we’ll be joined by Herb Sutter, President of the Standard C++ Foundation, the organization that is ultimately responsible for CppCon. During this trip we’ll also be meeting with local members of the planning committee, who will get their chance to tour the space.

The GR is hosting a special meeting of the local C++ meetup on March 14th at the GR which will feature a talk by Herb. If you are anywhere near Denver, don’t miss this opportunity to hear Herb’s talk and to get a taste of the new home for CppCon.

I’ll see you all in Aurora in September!