Early Bird registration is almost at an end. Only three days (one US business days) remain before the deadline.

Plenary Speaker: Mark Elendt

Academy award-winner, Mark Elendt will be giving his first CppCon talk on Patterns and Techniques Used in the Houdini 3D Graphics Application.

Mark has been working at SideFX, the creators of Houdini for over 25 years and it was in recognition of this work and the value of Houdini to the motion picture industry that Mark and SideFX Software were given a Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit earlier this year.

From his talk’s description:

Not only has Houdini been used in all of the Visual Effects Academy Award winning films of the past 10 years, but it has also been used for television shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things as well as content creation for many AAA video games, and even for scientific visualization. 

Houdini artists are tasked with creating amazing, never before seen visual effects. They constantly push both performance and scale in the software. Since the early 1990’s Houdini’s C++ architecture has provided a flexible platform that has enabled artists from around the world to 
create their vision. 

Mark will discuss some of the patterns and approaches that have been used in Houdini to meet the demands of production, from the early days of dealing with c-front to embracing modern features provided by modern C++. 

Don’t miss out on Early Bird registration. Only five days (two US business days) remain before the deadline.

Keynote Speaker: Kate Gregory

Kate Gregory is an author, sought-after conference speaker, trainer, Microsoft Regional Director, and partner at Gregory Consulting. She is also a frequent and popular speaker at CppCon and this year she be giving her first CppCon keynote address.

In her keynote, Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners, she will address the question, Why do so many people say that simple code is better code, but so few put it into practice?

From her talk’s description:

In this talk I’ll spend a little time on why simpler is better, and why we resist simplicity. Then I’ll provide some specific approaches that are likely to make your code simpler, and discuss what you need to know and do in order to consistently write simpler code and reap the benefits of that simplicity.

Less than a week remains for Early Bird registration. Only six days (three US business days) remain before the deadline.

Plenary Speaker: Chandler Carruth

Chandler, who leads the C++ and LLVM teams at Google and is one of the most popular speakers at CppCon, will tackle the new class of vulnerabilities in modern CPUs with his talk Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security. He is one of the lead engineers within Google and across the industry working to respond to these developments.

From his talk’s description:

The discovery of speculative execution side-channel attacks (called “Spectre”) fundamentally changes the security model of every modern superscalar microprocessor. Extracting secret data (credit cards, cryptographic keys) through side-channels is not new and has challenged the cryptographic community for decades. However, speculative execution attack techniques have fundamentally altered the ease and applicability of side-channels: far more code is impacted by these attacks and they can more reliably be weaponized. Responding to these issues has impacted CPU design, compiler design, library design, sandbox techniques and even the C++ programming language and standard.

This talk will explain how these kinds of attacks work at a high level and provide a clear set of terminology to describe these classes of vulnerabilities and attacks. It will show how the different variants work at the low level of modern hardware to give a detailed and precise understanding of the mechanics involved on CPUs today.

In addition to his plenary address, Chandler will participate in a panel discussion with other experts from across the industry who have helped lead this security incident response.

Next week is the last opportunity for Early Bird registration. Only nine days (four US business days) remain before the deadline.

We’ll be counting down the days with announcements of this year’s plenary speakers, including today’s plenary speaker announcement.

Next Friday, the last business day of Early Bird registration, we’ll share a special goodie.

Plenary Speakers: Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter

Two of our most popular speakers, Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter, are confirmed speakers for CppCon 2018. We are not yet ready to announce titles for these talks.