Early Bird Registration Ends this Weekend

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No matter when you register for CppCon 2018, you be able to :

  • Meet with
    • over a thousand other professional C++ engineers, including
      • book, blog, and library authors,
      • standards committee members,
      • compiler and other tool implementers, and
      • teachers and trainers
    • scores of the best presenters in the industry, and
    • exhibitors from all over the world
  • Attend
    • five days of six or seven tracks of peer-reviewed presentations,
    • daily plenary talks from recognized industry leaders,
    • multiple lightning talk sessions,
    • expert panels and special sessions,
    • poster presentations, and
    • social events.

But if you do it by this weekend, you save more than enough money to treat yourself to the Meet the Speakers Dinner.

To help you decide, here, for the first time, is this year’s promo video:

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

CppCon 2018 Plenary: Patterns and Techniques Used in the Houdini 3D Graphics Application by Mark Elendt

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

Plenary Speaker: Mark Elendt

Mark ElendtAcademy 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++. 

CppCon 2018 Keynote: Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners by Kate Gregory

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

Keynote Speaker: Kate Gregory

Kate GregoryKate 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.

CppCon 2018 Plenary: Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security by Chandler Carruth

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Chandler CarruthLess 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.

Early Bird Deadline | First Speaker Announcement

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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

Herb SutterBjarne Stroustrup

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.

Call for Volunteers – Announcing Our New Volunteer Grant Program

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Volunteering at CppCon

If you would like to attend CppCon 2018, see great C++ content, and meet our speakers and attendees, but a week’s registration doesn’t fit your time or money budget, consider volunteering.

Ambience_and_snacks_6

We are looking for volunteers to help run the conference. We need people to:

  • help assemble registration packets and badges,
  • register attendees,
  • assist speakers with Audio/Video (AV),
  • and, in general, be on hand to make things run smoothly.

In exchange, we’ll see to it that you’ll spend at least half of your time in sessions. It would be great if you could join us for the whole week, but if you can only make it for one or two days, we can work with that. We have information on our Volunteer Page. If you would like more information, please email volunteers@cppcon.org.

Announcing the Volunteer Grant Program, new for 2018

Most of the volunteers that we’ve had at CppCon have come from the local area. We are delighted with the support that we’ve received from the Northwest C++ Users’ Group and the Seattle area C++ community. The help that we’ve received running the conference for the last four years has been invaluable for the conference, but it is also a wonderful experience for anyone interested in C++. We’d like to make that opportunity available more broadly, so we are announcing a program to provide financial support that will make it possible for individuals to volunteer, even if they would have to incur travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference.

This program has grants to cover some or (in a few cases) all of the costs of lodging and travel for a limited number of volunteers. Grants will be awarded to applicants that can commit to volunteering for five days. Grant applications will be judged on the basis of participation and leadership in the C++ community.

If you:

  • are active in the C++ community on-line, in your local user group, or at C++ events,
  • are actively supporting C++ on StackOverflow or GitHub,
  • have worked on an Open Source C++ project like an Open Source library, CppReference, C++VAP,
  • write reviews for Open Source libraries on Boost, Boost Incubator, or C++ Reviews,
  • or, have a blog, podcast or YouTube channel on C++,

but have not attended CppCon because you can’t afford the travel and lodging, this is your opportunity.

For more information about the Volunteer Grant Program, read our Volunteer Page.

Submission Reminder

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Submission Deadline

The deadline for session submissions is only days away. Review the Call for Submissions and make your submission soon. You can run your ideas by the Submission Advice mailing list, but you must hurry for this. The advice list gets very busy as the deadline draws near.

Call for Program Committee

Because CppCon is a community-run conference, we ask members of the community that are experienced C++ programmers to consider joining the CppCon Program Committee.

The PC’s job is to evaluate the hundreds of submissions that we receive for each conference so we can make the best possible program every year. This is a challenging job and requires a time commitment from a lot of very talented people. PC members get the satisfaction of serving the C++ community and the opportunity to “pay forward” the benefits they’ve received from the conference program. They also have the opportunity to keep abreast of interesting trends and developments in C++. Those PC members who would like to present at CppCon or other conferences will discover that reviewing submissions will result in increased skill at creating compelling conference submissions.

Please review the CppCon Program Committee Reviewers’ Guide and contact program@cppcon.org if you’re interested in joining the committee.

Call for Submission Advisors

If you have experience creating conference presentations or evaluating conference submissions, please consider helping with the CppCon Submission Advice mailing list.

The work of the Submission Advice volunteers is important to getting the best possible program for the conference each year. It particularly important for us to reach our goal of getting new voices and first time presenters to be represented in the program.

Please review the Submission Advice Volunteers’ Guide and contact program@cppcon.org if you’re interested in volunteering on the Submission Advice mailing list.

Registration for CppCon 2018 is Open

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Registration is now open for CppCon 2018 to be held September 23-28, 2018 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington, USA.

CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience. Taking place this year in the beautiful Seattle neighborhood and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.

Audience13

What you can expect at CppCon:

CppCon’s goal is to encourage the best use of C++ while preserving the diversity of viewpoints and experiences. The conference is a project of the Standard C++ Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the C++ software developer community and promote the understanding and use of modern, standard C++ on all compilers and platforms.

CppCon 2018 Call for Submissions

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CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community and so we invite you to present. The conference regular program consists of five days of seven tracks of one hour sessions.

Have you learned something interesting about C++, maybe a new technique possible in C++14/17? Or perhaps you have implemented something cool related to C++, maybe a new C++ library? If so, consider sharing it with other C++ enthusiasts by giving a regular program talk at CppCon 2018.

The submissions deadline is May 11 with decisions sent by July 1.

For topic ideas, possible formats, submission instructions and valuable advice on how to make the best possible submission, see the Submissions page.

Note: Calls for lightning talks and Open Content sessions will be made this summer. The deadline for these is the conference itself.

Inclusiveness, accessibility, and CppCon 2017 videos

Posted on by Herb Sutter

CppCon has always aimed to be a welcoming environment for everyone, across the whole diverse worldwide C++ community. We made that a cornerstone of our very first blog post nearly four years ago, and since then we’ve invited speakers from as many industries and personal backgrounds as we could, tried to keep ticket prices affordable (nominal and free for students and volunteers, respectively, to help them attend), rolled out successively more detailed codes of conduct, and at last fall’s event we were excited for the first time to have sessions and events especially geared toward families and kids who are just learning how much fun programming can be… yes, in C++.

We’ve also always professionally recorded all talks and made the videos available to everyone in the world for free, so that as many people as possible can benefit. For CppCon 2017, that meant engaging the pros at Bash Films once again to shoot and produce 137 high-quality videos, which were posted on YouTube within a few weeks after the event.

Today we’re happy to announce that, as in previous years, all CppCon 2017 videos are now available on Channel 9 in addition to YouTube. This makes them available in more geographies where YouTube may not be readily available, and it makes it possible for you to download videos for offline viewing, making them even easier to watch during your commute time or whenever you don’t have a high-bandwidth connection. Thank you again to Google for hosting our videos on YouTube, and to Microsoft for hosting them on Channel 9!

Closed captionedBut this year we’re very pleased to announce something new: Inclusiveness also includes doing what we can to make our content available to those in our C++ community who have disabilities or other barriers to benefiting fully from the recordings. So, for the first time this year, all CppCon 2017 videos are now professionally captioned; the captions are live now on the YouTube videos, and will be available soon also on the Channel 9 videos. We hope that this will help to make the content even more accessible to viewers who are hearing-impaired, and also help non-native English speakers follow the content more easily. Additionally, we hope this will make the job of the all-volunteer C++ Video Access Project effort that much easier, because English language captioning is also the first step to making videos accessible to non-English speakers via captioning in additional languages.

Closed captioning example

You don’t need to buy a CppCon ticket to watch any of the videos. However, if you have attended CppCon in person, let me say a personal thank you: because not only did you get the rich and full community experience that can only be had by being there, but these professionally-edited and -captioned videos are possible because a portion of every CppCon ticket sold goes to funding these for everyone (including for you after you get home, to watch again or to catch the ones you couldn’t attend because we nearly always have 6 or 7 tracks in progress). Thank you for your support.

In a few months, we’ll open registration for CppCon 2018. When we do, I’m pleased that exactly the same words we used in our very first blog post continue to accurately describe our event [emphasis original]:

“CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience. Taking place this year in the beautiful Seattle neighborhood and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.”

I look forward to seeing many of you there again this fall to enjoy and benefit from the intensive community interaction that’s only available in person. But if you can’t make it this year, you can count on the professionally-recorded and -captioned videos being available again for free, within a few weeks after the conference, and accessible to as many people as we possibly can reach including the hearing-impaired and non-native English speakers.

On behalf of the Standard C++ Foundation, thank you again to everyone for your support for the C++ community and CppCon.