Inclusiveness, accessibility, and CppCon 2017 videos

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.

Call for Proposals for CppCon 2018 Classes

The conference is asking for instructors to submit proposals for pre- and post-conferences classes to be taught in conjunction with next September’s CppCon 2018.

If you are interested in teaching such a class, please contact us at info@cppcon.org and we’ll send you an instructors’ prospectus and address any questions that you might have. The deadline for submitting proposals is December 22nd, 2017.

Thanks / 2018 Dates / 2017 Trip Reports

Save the date for the week of September 23th next year in Bellevue, Washington. Building on the success of this year’s pre and post-conference classes, we will be offering classes on September 22nd-23rd and 29th-30th. The CppCon 2018 Registration Reception will be on the 23rd and sessions will be the 24th though the 28th.

In the meantime, look for slides and source code for your favorite CppCon 2017 sessions at our presentation material repository.

You can find the posters that were entered in the CppCon 2017 Poster Competition in the poster repository.

You can also watch CppCon 2017 session videos on YouTube and Channel 9. Some of them are already available on the CppCon YouTube channel in the CppCon 2017 playlist.

I want to say thanks very much to all the hundreds of people that made CppCon 2017 possible and, in particular, I want to thank those that have published trip reports:

A Beginner’s Guide to CPPCon 2017 by Eva Bunny Conti

CppCon 2017 Trip Report by Charles L. Wilcox

CppCon 2017 Trip Report by Ben Deane

CppCon 2017 by Oliver Smith

CppCon 2017 Trip Report by Matt Godbolt

CppCon 2017 trip report by Viktor Kirilov

CppCon 2017 Trip Report by Isabella Muerte

My CppCon 2017 Trip Report – 10 great talks to watch and learn from by Quentin Duval

A CppCon 2017 trip report by Jens Weller

CppCon 2017 For Fun and Profit by Tim van Deurzen

Trip report: the JetBrains C++ team at CppCon 2017 by Anastasia Kazakova

Trip Report: CppCon 2017 by Chloe Jandsten

CppCon 2017 trip report by Mathieu Ropert

CppCon’17 Trip Report by Pan Deng

CppCon 2017: trip report by Giuseppe D’Angelo

CppCon 2017 Trip Report by Gordon Brown

And day-by-day dispatches from Sergey ‘No Bugs’ Hare Ignatchenko:

#CPPCON2017 Day 0: IMO best posters

#CPPCON2017. Day 1. Hope to get something-better-than-chevron-hell

#CPPCON2017. Day 2. Why Local Allocators are a Good Thing(tm) Performance-Wise, and Why I am Very Cautious about C++17 STL parallelized algos

#CPPCON2017. Day 3. The Future of C++

#CPPCON2017. Day 4. Async Rulezzz!

If you know of any trip reports I’ve missed, please let me know.

look forward to seeing you in Bellevue next September.

Plenary Announced: Matt Godbolt

Matt Godbolt‘s closing plenary is entitled, What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler’s Lid The abstract gives a history of the project that has made Godbolt a verb:

Matt GodboltIn 2012, Matt and a colleague were arguing whether it was efficient to use the then-new-fangled range for. During the discussion a bash script was written to quickly compile C++ source and dump the assembly. Five years later and that script has grown into a website relied on by many to quickly see the code their compiler emits, to compare different compilers’ code generation and behaviour, to quickly prototype and share code, and investigate the effect of optimization flags.

In this talk Matt will not only show you how easy (and fun!) it is to understand the assembly code generated by your compiler, but also how important it can be. He’ll explain how he uses Compiler Explorer in his day job programming low-latency trading systems, and show some real-world examples. He’ll demystify assembly code and give you the tools to understand and appreciate how hard your compiler works for you.

He’ll also talk a little about how Compiler Explorer works behind the scenes, how it is maintained and deployed, and  share some stories about how it has changed over the years. By the end of this session you’ll be itching to take your favourite code snippets and start exploring what your compiler does with them.

If you’d like to thank Matt in person for Compiler Explorer, there is still time to register (but not much).

Plenary Announced: Lars Knoll

Lars Knoll

Lars Knoll‘s plenary is entitled, Qt as a C++ Framework: History, Present State and Future.

This address is a good overview for those that are new to Qt and offers a look into the future for those that are using Qt now. From the abstract:

Qt is one of the largest and most widely used C++ frameworks. It is fully cross-platform, covering all functionality required to develop advanced graphical applications. The talk will go through important parts of Qt’s history from it’s roots to what it is today. We will have a look into the relation between Qt and C++, some of the design philosophies driving the evolution of Qt. I’ll go through the current state of the frameworks, latest releases, ongoing development focus, and give an outlook into the future.

This is a valuable opportunity to get an insider’s understanding of one of the most successful frameworks in C++.

Plenary Announced: Herb Sutter

Herb SutterHerb Sutter‘s plenary is entitled, Meta: Thoughts on generative C++. As he tells us:

Two years ago, I started to focus on exploring ways that we might evolve the C++ language itself to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. The only way to accomplish both of those goals at the same time is by adding abstractions that let programmers directly express their intent—to elevate comments and documentation to testable code, and elevate coding patterns and idioms into compiler-checkable declarations. The work came up with several potential candidate features where judiciously adding some power to the language could simplify code dramatically, while staying true to C++’s core values of efficient abstraction, closeness to hardware, and the zero-overhead principle. 

The first two potential candidate features from that work to be further developed and proposed for ISO C++ are the <=> unified comparison operator (minor) and what I’ve provisionally called “metaclasses” as a way to generatively write C++ types (major). This talk is about the latter, and includes design motivation, current progress, and some live online compiler demos using the prototype Clang-based compiler built by Andrew Sutton and hosted at godbolt.org.

This presentation is an expansion of the Thoughts on Metaclasses session, presented at ACCU this past April. Due to the overwhelming positive response the presentation generated, Herb will expand the scope and focus on the implications of Metaclasses that it will bring to future progress of the C++ language. The concept is a groundbreaking change in C++ development and is a session not to be missed.

Calls for Lightning Talks and Open Content

Almost here

Less than 2 days out from CppCon 2022, regular session submissions are long closed. But, even now, there are still conference opportunities. There is still over two weeks left of regular registration, we are still accepting class registrations, we have rooms available in some of our official hotel blocks, and it isn’t too late to attend sessions for free by signing up as a volunteer.

To day we are also opening up two ways to present at the conference.

Call for Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are fast paced, short presentations often sprinkled with humor and intrigue. The popular 5-minute talks present topics that are interesting to C++ programmers. This opportunity is open to speakers at all experience levels.

Check out some of our previous lightning talks on our YouTube channel. They cover a single topic, start with the good stuff, and end making a point. Anyone can do one, but be sure to practice because 5 minutes goes by incredibly fast. Here is your opportunity to share that one technique you wish everyone knew, that one little known fact that should be well known, that one tool that makes your life easier every day, or a collection of little things that you can fit into 5 minutes.

Anyone can submit a lightning talk, you don’t need to be a conference speaker (or even a registered attendee). To submit, visit our Lightning Talks Submissions page.

Call for Open Content

As we do every year, we offer Open Content session in the early morning, over lunch, and in the evening.

Audience8

Open Content is just that, open! Attendees and regular program speakers alike can propose sessions on anything that interests them. These might feature a single facilitator leading a room through an exercise, activity or demo, a panel of 3-5 people taking questions from the room, a “hackathon” on a specific project, or an open conversation among the whole room. The projector is available for slides or public note taking.

Open Content is designed for flexibility so that a “Birds of a Feather” talk may be proposed even after the conference has begun. A speaker who gets a lot of post-talk questions may agree to host a Q&A session in the Open Content time. An attendee inspired by a session may host a session to explore a topic further or start on a group implementation of something.

Anyone can submit an open content session, you don’t need to be a conference speaker (or even a registered attendee). To submit, visit our Open Content Submissions page.

These sessions will be open in another way too – Open Content does not require conference registration. That’s right, everyone who is in the area is welcome to come and join us for all the early morning/lunch/evening sessions, including proposing or leading a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.

Free Friday

All CppCon 2017 events on Friday, September 29th, do not require conference registration. That’s right, just like all our evening sessions, all Friday sessions are open to the public without a conference registration. This includes an address by one of our most highly anticipated plenary speakers, Matt Godbolt, and the Sara Chipps lecture and workshop.

Plenary Announced: Titus Winters

We are pleased to announce our remaining plenary speaker for CppCon 2017: Titus Winters.

Titus WintersTitus leads Google’s C++ common libraries project and is one of four arbiters of Google’s official C++ style guidelines. For the last 6 years, Titus has been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Titus also designed much of Google’s internal C++ training curriculum, and reinvented Google’s C++ mentorship program. Prior to tackling these large scale C++ challenges, Titus worked on networking APIs in embedded systems.

As a member of the C++ standards committee, Titus focuses his efforts on the evolution of the standard library and is the incoming chair of the Library Evolution Working Group. In addition, Titus is an active speaker in the broader C++ industry and community, advocating for more scalable and maintainable coding guidelines and practices.

He has also been known to have deep thoughts about the card game Hanabi and the proper preparation of classic cocktails, although sometimes these run at cross purposes.

Titus’ presentation, C++ as a “Live at Head” Language,  will start with an exciting announcement; we’re keeping the details to ourselves until CppCon 2017.

Welcoming Everyone

CppCon has always valued diversity and tried to make everyone feel welcome. To that end, we’ve decided to strengthen the wording of our Code of Conduct, to make sure that everyone knows that they will be actively supported and welcome. To leverage the best practices and experience of others, we’ve adopted the current PyCon code of conduct as-is, modulo editorial diffs to rename it for CppCon. Thanks very much to the PyCon organizers for open-sourcing and sharing their work!

Happily, as far as we know there haven’t been any incidents at CppCon so far, and we’d like to do what we can to keep it that way and make everyone feel as welcome as possible. That especially includes kids – this year we are looking forward very much to the talk by Sara J. Chipps on her success inspiring about 4,000 kids aged 8-12 to learn to write C++, and to the related Jewelbots Build Workshop “for kids and grownups” at CppCon 2017! We want there to continue to be inclusive sessions and events like this at CppCon in the future, and we welcome your suggestions for ones we could include in our planning; if you have suggestions, please send email to plan@cppcon.org.