Each evening the conference activities will break for dinner from 5:45 to 8:30, giving you time to head out and enjoy a meal with fellow attendees. But after eating, don’t head back for a boring night in your hotel room – come back to the venue for another 90 minutes of learning and networking!

Monday through Thursday from 8:30 pm to 10 pm is the evening program. Looser and less structured than the daytime program, it’s designed to get you engaged and give you opportunities that traditional sessions can’t offer. In our six rooms, one will hold a single “conference planned” session that spans the full 90 minutes, and the other five will hold open content, two 45-minute sessions per room. There will also be open content in all 6 rooms from 8:00am to 8:45 Tuesday through Friday.

The “conference planned” sessions are Meet the Authors Monday, Lightning Talks Tuesday, Grill the Committee Wednesday and Conference Planning Thursday. More details on each of these will be coming shortly.

Open content is just that, open! Attendees and speakers alike can propose sessions on anything that interests them. These might be a single facilitator leading a room through an exercise, activity or demo, a panel of 3-5 people taking questions from the room and answering them, a “hackathon” on a specific project, or an open conversation among the whole room. The projector is available (possibly to take collaborative notes, possibly to display content related to the exercise; typical slide presentations are not the best fit for open content sessions.)

Many of these “Birds of a Feather” talks will be proposed on site as the conference progresses. 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. Some can be proposed in advance and with 64 slots to fill, our job will be easier if many of them are. To propose a session, simply email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us who you are and what you want a session about. If you have time constraints such as “after a specific session” or “not on the same day as a specific session” let us know in the email. (For example, someone who will be grilled at Grill The Committee Wednesday can’t do an open session Wednesday evening.)

These sessions will be open in another way too – evening 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 evening sessions, including to propose or lead a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.

Attendees will be able to express their interest in these sessions in advance, enabling us to schedule them and to select the most popular if we have more submissions than slots. More details on that will follow soon. For now, please email your submissions as soon as you can so that our planning work can get underway. See you in Bellevue!

A quick note for those who haven’t yet arranged their hotel accommodation: one of the official CppCon 2014 hotels has already sold out while the special price for the second one, Hyatt Regency Bellevue, expires on August 7th.

We have finalized the third keynote for CppCon 2014:

Mike Acton: “Data-Oriented Design and C++“

The transformation of data is the only purpose of any program. Common approaches in C++ which are antithetical to this goal will be presented in the context of a performance-critical domain (console game development). Additionally, limitations inherent in any C++ compiler and how that affects the practical use of the language when transforming that data will be demonstrated.

Speaker’s bio: Mike Acton is Engine Director at Insomniac Games. When he’s not searching for new ways to optimize Insomniac’s engine, he dreams up new ways to help the development community. Mike can often be found extolling the virtues of understanding the data and hardware first along with programming for performance.

Tony Antoun, Igor Zaika: “How Microsoft Uses C++ to Deliver Office (and More) Across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac“

What does it take to target multiple major mobile devices (as well as traditional environments) with portable, efficient, single-source code? This talk demonstrates architectures, techniques, and lessons learned rooted in actual experience with using C++ to deliver several major cross-platform projects across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac: Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) and the SQL Server PowerBI. Each presents a different case study: For example, Office already used C++, whereas PowerBI was originally written in Silverlight and then rewritten in C++; Office is a set of user-facing apps, whereas PowerBI is a system component. Although some of these are demanding first-tier “Cadillac” applications, we expect this experience to be a model for the future as more and more apps fall into this category and use C++ to target many popular platforms from (mostly) a single source base.

This talk covers the following key topics and tradeoffs: Rich vs. reach, including access to latest OS features (e.g., iOS 8 additions) and hardware features (e.g., vector units, GPUs). Consistency of functionality. Client code vs. server/service web code. Sharing vs. quality, including dialing appropriately between more shared code and high quality code. Drawing the line between the bulk of C++ code and interfacing with non-C++ for UX and PALs (platform adaptation/abstraction layers) for target-specific user interface and system services. Architecting PALs, including why “mini-PALs” rather than an “über-PAL.” Forcing “doing the right thing” and good architecture with composable components. How C++ enables things not feasible using other technologies. Velocity and enabling faster cross-platform development and deployment. Cost of maintenance, including time, size, and complexity (both breadth and depth). And, last but not least, developing in a single modern C++ source base built with different evolving C++ compilers, including VC++ and Clang/LLVM.

Speakers’ bio: Tony Antoun is Director of Development for APEX, focusing on delivering Office on all Apple platforms and form factors (iPhone, iPad, Mac), as well as aligning the Office experience on other major platforms (Win32, WinRT, Android). Before that, Dev Manager for SQL PowerBI – a cross-platform interactive client data visualization solution (iOS, WinRT, Web) connected to the SQL Reporting cloud service. Before that, Dev Manager for HD-DVD, cross-platform client solution for High Definition interactivity of media experiences (Win32, WinCE, Linux, Xbox).

Igor Zaika is the Development Manager for the Office Core Experience team at Microsoft, responsible for shared UX components and application framework used by Office applications. Before that, Igor worked in various areas related to Office client applications, ranging from building Word Object Model and integrating VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) with Office, to shipping first version of OneNote for the WinRT platform. Before joining Microsoft, Igor worked on 3D CAD application and contributed to the Kronos project.

We left a few slots in the CppCon 2014 program for what we call “invited talks”. They are used to fill in important but otherwise under-represented topics (such as game development, mobile and embedded systems, etc) or generally interesting and unusual uses of C++. Today we are ready to announce the first two invited talks which are on Facebook’s heavy use of C++ in their server infrastructure:

Marcelo Juchem: “Meta Techniques: Heterogeneous Polymorphism and Fast Prototyping at Facebook“

As data driven systems evolve there’s an ever growing demand for bringing new functionality into existing systems in an efficient, maintainable and least intrusive manner. When implementing features with different semantics or interfaces, virtual inheritance requires a compromise between design simplicity and performance. This implies a need for new techniques to achieve heterogeneous polymorphism efficiently. With C++11 and 14, type lists, type maps and variants can now be trivially implemented by the initiated. Facebook moves fast so we quickly adopted the new standards to further explore the capabilities of the type system. This talk demonstrates some meta-programming techniques like reflection and compile-time built structures to achieve heterogeneous polymorphism and fast prototyping.

Speaker’s bio: Marcelo Juchem is a Software Engineer at Facebook, working in stream processing and spam fighting systems. Fascinated by template meta-programming, he sees the C++ compiler as a powerful type juggler and programmable code generator. Such capabilities allow the combinatoric composition of types into efficient abstractions, reducing code duplication and enabling non-library writers to design logical components interaction and semantics rather than deal with low level details.

Drew Paroski: “C++@Facebook: How HHVM Uses Modern C++ for Fun and Profit (Both Literally)“

After an overview of HHVM’s architecture and history, this talk delves into what made C++ the language of choice when writing VMs and execution engines, including performance, benefits over assembly, and enabling C++ to call into JIT’d code. We cover the importance of control over ‘unsafe’ details: for memory layout, unions, casting, and bit-stealing. HHVM found important wins from being able to ensure that certain structures (Classes) are allocated in low-memory (i.e. addresses that fit within 32-bits) which allowed use of 32-bit immediates in machine code and 32-bit fields in objects. Also, being able to have fine control over memory allocation enabled having “huge pages”, a feature exposed in Linux (and other OSes) that allowed using fewer iTLB entries which gave a significant boost for Facebook’s PHP codebase. The talk will also mention some things that got in the way and how they were dealt with. Some were language features, such as virtual functions, member pointers. Before move constructors and rvalues were introduced in C++11, there were performance issues with returning smart pointers. While these were things that got in the way, it’s a testament to C++’s flexibility that there were always ways to work around these things in a stable fashion.

Speaker’s bio: Drew Paroski is a Software Engineer at Facebook and a co-creator of the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) and the Hack programming language. Among other things, Drew is the primary designer and implementor of HHVM’s virtual instruction set architecture and Hack’s Collections framework, and he was a core contributor to HHVM’s JIT compiler in the early days of the project. Before Facebook, Drew worked at Microsoft helping improve the performance of Microsoft’s virtual machine for .NET languages (C#, VB.NET, F#, and more) known as the Common Language Runtime. Drew has been coding in C++ for over 10 years, and he enjoys designing and optimizing complex low-level systems.

Every time we post an update on CppCon 2014 someone asks if there will be a recording of the conference. From the beginning we ruled out going the C++Now way by having student volunteers record sessions using consumer camcoders. It is a huge headache for those organizing it just for C++Now’s 3 tracks. It simply won’t scale to CppCon’s 6. So the decision was made to either record professionally or not to record at all. And professional recording of a week-long conference with 6 tracks is not cheap. This is why we couldn’t give a concrete answer until we knew for sure. And now we know for sure: we found a sponsor (can’t yet announce who it is), the contract has been signed, and the entire 6 tracks will be professionally recorded!

Now if you think there is no longer a good reason to attend CppCon in person, let me give you several. There will be recording but no live streaming (live streaming is on a whole new level, expense-wise). Because of the number of sessions involved, we will only be able to publish them about a month later. There will also be no recording of the “unconference” material: lightning talks, hackathons, BoF sessions, extended Q&A, etc.

But the main difference between being there and watching things a month later is missing out on what happens after the talks. Organizers of C++Now like to joke that half of the conference happens between the presentations, in personal interactions.

From personal experience, I spent 1.5 hours after my C++Now presentation chatting to a bunch of attendees who were particularly interested in the topic of my talk. I am not kidding: it was the same length as my presentation! You can’t participate in stuff like this if you are not there.

The bottom line: yes, you will eventually be able to view all the sessions but you will miss out on a lot of fun, personal interactions, and insight that comes with that.

Video recording is also great news for those planning to come. Remember, you can only attend one talk out of every six. But now you will be able to catch up with the video recordings.

If you have never attended a C++ conference and you are not sure whether CppCon is worth it, I hope I managed to convey some of the atmosphere that you can expect. If C++Now is anything to go by, this will be a week where you will learn more about C++ than in the rest of the year all while having a lot of fun.

And remember, the Early Bird registration deadline is tomorrow.

The CppCon 2014 Program is now available with talk titles, abstracts, and speakers. The program contains over 100 one-hour sessions by over 70 speakers including plenary sessions by Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter, as well as the keynotes by C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup on Keeping Simple Things Simple and Mark Maimone on using C++ on Mars: Incorporating C++ into Mars Rover Flight Software.

The detailed schedule including the exact day and time of each talk will be posted in the coming weeks. We have also extended the Early Bird deadline to July 9 so you have a week to study the program and still get the Early Bird rate.

Finally, we would like to thank the program committee, the speakers on the program, and the many more 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!

There are several developments in preparation for the conference: We’ve sent the acceptance notifications to authors who proposed talks. If you haven’t received the email, please contact the Program Committee. The Program Committee is now hard at work putting together and scheduling the program and we still aim to have it ready by the 27th of June. Note also that the early bird deadline is only 9 days away. Finally, we have the second keynote for CppCon 2014:

C++ on Mars: Incorporating C++ into Mars Rover Flight Software
by Dr. Mark Maimone

One of the more challenging aspects of developing flight software (FSW) for NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover was how to enable them to drive themselves safely through unknown Martian terrain. When the MER mission was approved in the year 2000, JPL researchers had already demonstrated that capability on prototype rovers using software written primarily in C++ on a VxWorks realtime O/S platform with shared memory. So when asked to incorporate that capability into the MER vehicles which also relied on a similar VxWorks realtime O/S, the team concluded it would be safest and most expedient to incorporate the already field-tested C++ software. But that presented a challenge, since at that point all rover FSW development was mandated to be done mainly in the C programming language.

In this talk we present some of the challenges we faced and solutions we found in deploying C++ onto the Mars Rovers. For example, dynamic allocation was initially precluded, but development of a specialized memory allocator (using the C++ “placement new” operator) enabled us to incorporate it safely into the flight system. We will discuss what aspects of C++ were incorporated, what simulation environments aided development, describe some of the tools used to validate system behavior, and explain how our success using C++ for the implementation of autonomous navigation on MER has influenced future FSW efforts.

Speaker’s bio: Dr. Mark Maimone is a Navigation and Machine Vision researcher at JPL. Mark designed and developed the autonomous vision and navigation software that lets the MER and MSL Mars Rovers drive themselves safely, and wrote ground software that automated the analysis of Mobility and arm operations on MER. Mark is now a Rover Driver for Curiosity, and he continues to develop and enhance the onboard autonomous vision and navigation software for the rovers. Mark earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996, and completed a postdoc there in 1997 as Navigation and Software Lead for the 1997 Atacama Desert Trek. At JPL since 1997, Mark has also worked on the Long Range Science Rover, Planetary Dexterous Manipulator, and Pioneer Vision System for Chornobyl Inspection projects, delivering 3D vision systems for autonomous robotic operations and mapping.

Stefanus Du Toit: “Hourglass Interfaces for C++ APIs”
Pedro Ramalhete, Andreia Correia: “How to Make Your Data Structures Wait-Free for Reads”
Gor Nishanov: “await 2.0: Stackless Resumable Functions”
Fedor Pikus: “Where did My Performance Go? (Scaling Visualization in Concurrent C++ Programs)”
Łukasz Mendakiewicz: “Viewing the World Through Array-Shaped Glasses”

Stefanus Du Toit: “Hourglass Interfaces for C++ APIs“

C++ provides a much richer set of abstractions than C. Classes, templates, overloading, and other core C++ features can be leveraged for more readable syntax, better compile time typechecking, more open ended genericity and improved modularity. On the flip side, C89 still boasts some advantages over C++, especially when viewed through a pragmatic lens. C ABIs on many platforms have been stable for decades, practically every language supports binding to C code through foreign function interfaces, and including nearly any C89 header has a negligible effect on compile time on modern computers. The Hourglass pattern provides the best of both worlds. It’s a way to structure libraries that retains the pragmatic benefits of C89 while still providing C++’s richness both at an interface and implementation level. It makes providing bindings from other languages to C++ libraries easier, and insulates from ABI issues such as incompatibilities between debug and release variants of runtimes. This talk provides an overview of the pattern, teaches practical techniques for its implementation using C++98 and C++11, and shares experience from using the pattern in real world projects.

Speaker’s bio: Stefanus Du Toit is a Software Lead at Thalmic Labs, where he enables amazing gestural experiences using the Myo armband. Stefanus previously worked as a Software Architect and Software Development Manager at Intel Corporation, and co-founded RapidMind (acquired by Intel), a startup that targeted GPUs and other processors using standard C++. Stefanus served on the C++ standards committee as Project Editor for C++14 and as Committee Secretary. He lives in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and holds a BMath CS from the University of Waterloo.

Pedro Ramalhete, Andreia Correia: “How to Make Your Data Structures Wait-Free for Reads“

In this talk we will describe a new concurrency control algorithm with Blocking write operations and Wait-Free Population Oblivious read operations, which we named the Left-Right algorithm. We will show a new pattern where this algorithm is applied, which requires using two instances of a given resource, and can be used for any data structure, allowing concurrent access to it similarly to a Reader-Writer lock, but in a non-blocking manner for reads, including safe memory management without needing a GC.

Speaker’s bio: Pedro Ramalhete has a PhD in Particle Physics for research done at CERN. Most of the research itself required programming in C++, and he also had a major participation in the coding of the experiment’s data acquisition and decoding software in C and C++. Pedro is currently working at Cisco writing networking software, with emphasis on real-time concurrent synchronization techniques, and wait-free/lock-free data structures.

Gor Nishanov: “await 2.0: Stackless Resumable Functions“

When dealing with the task/future based asynchronous model, developers need to write lambda-heavy continuation code with potentially multiple nesting lambdas. This makes the code less readable and not very pleasant to write. Stackless resumable functions allow developers to use more natural imperative coding style and provide performance benefits that are not possible with library-only solutions.

Speaker’s bio: Gor Nishanov is a Principal Software Design Engineer on the Microsoft C++ team. He works on the ‘await’ feature. Prior to joining the C++ team, Gor was working on distributed systems in Windows Clustering team.

Fedor Pikus: “Where did My Performance Go? (Scaling Visualization in Concurrent C++ Programs)“

High performance is one of the main reasons programmers choose C++ for their applications. If you are writing in C++, odds are you need every bit of computing power your hardware can provide. Today, this means writing multi-threaded programs to effectively utilize the multiple CPU cores that the hardware manufacturers keep adding. Everyone knows that writing multi-threaded programs is hard. Writing correct multi-threaded programs is even harder. Only after spending countless hours debugging race conditions and weird intermittent bugs do many programmers learn that writing efficient multi-threaded programs is harder yet. Have you ever wanted to see what are all your threads doing when they should be busy computing? This talk will show you how. We begin by studying several techniques necessary for collecting large amounts of data from the running program very efficiently, with little overhead and minimal disruption to the program itself. We will cover efficient thread-safe memory management and efficient thread-safe disk I/O. Along the way we dabble in lock-free programming just enough to meet our needs, lest the subject will spiral into an hour-long talk of its own. With all these techniques put together, we can collect information about what each thread is doing, which threads are computing and what exactly, and which threads are slacking off waiting on locks, and do it at the time scale of tens of microseconds if necessary. Then we process the collected data and create a timeline that shows exactly what the program was doing at every moment in time.

Łukasz Mendakiewicz: “Viewing the World Through Array-Shaped Glasses“

It’s agreed among experts that the most performant data structure in C++ is an array. Or a vector. Or a dynarray. Indeed, until recently there was no standardized approach in C++ to view these types in a uniform manner. It was even murkier when the data had logically more than one dimension. This talk is an introduction to the new features proposed for C++17 in N3851 bringing all contiguous data into harmony and lifting it to higher dimensions: index, bounds, array_view and more. Attendees will also learn how indexable algorithms differ from the traditional elemental ones, and what does it mean for parallelism.

Speaker’s bio: Łukasz Mendakiewicz is a software engineer at Microsoft, where he focuses on the customer experience with parallel programming models for C++. He is especially interested in GPGPU acceleration, and puts this passion to work on C++ AMP. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from AGH UST in Krakow, Poland.

Jeff Garland: “Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11”
Kate Gregory and James McNellis: “Making C++ Code Beautiful”
Joel Falcou: “Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures”
Walter E. Brown: “Your Help Wanted: Language Proposals in Flight”
Jens Weller and Jon Kalb: “Founding C++ User Groups”

Jeff Garland: “Rebuilding Boost Date-Time for C++11“

Boost date_time is a widely used C++ library originally released in 2001 — including being the basis for elements of the chrono library in C++11. While the library interface has stayed stable for more than a decade, the world around it has changed with the standard library and language changing. It is time for the library to be rewritten to account for C++11. This lecture describes in detail the design decisions and changes to the library for C++11. More generally it describes elements of design for a small valuetype library. Many of these considerations involve new features of C++11 and how they should be used. This includes noexcept, move construction/assignment (R-values), constexpr, enum classes, and user defined literals. Attendees will learn about the design considerations and tradeoffs of using the new language features in their own work while getting a glimpse of boost date_time version 2.

Speaker’s bio: Jeff Garland has worked on many large-scale, distributed software projects over the past 25+ years. He’s a long time participant in the Boost and C++ community including developing Boost date_time, serving as a moderator and Boost steering committee member, co-authoring papers for the C++11 chrono library, and running the annual Library in a Week workshop at C++Now. Mr. Garland holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona. He is a co-author of “Large Scale Software Architecture: A Practical Guide Using UML.”

Kate Gregory and James McNellis: “Making C++ Code Beautiful“

Ask a non-C++ developer what they think of C++ and they’ll give the language plenty of compliments: powerful, fast, flexible, and “the language for smart people”. But along with that you are likely to hear ugly, complicated, hard to read, and “the language for smart people”. Is it possible to write beautiful C++? Not arcanely elegant or wickedly compact, but readable, clear, expressive – beautiful! We say it is, and we want to show you how. In this session, you’ll see how to turn pages of “comic book characters swearing” into code you’ll be proud to call your own. By making your code express your intent, using the power of new language and library functionality, and leaving hard-to-read constructs out of your vocabulary, you can give your code a makeover that will stand the test of time.

Speakers’ bio: Kate Gregory has been using C++ since before Microsoft had a C++ compiler. She writes, mentors, codes, and leads projects, in both C++ and .NET, especially for Windows 7 and 8. Kate is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual C++ MVP, and has written over a dozen books (the most recent on C++ AMP for Microsoft Press) and speaks at conferences and user groups around the world. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight, founded the East of Toronto .NET Users group, and is a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough.

James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.

Joel Falcou: “Costless Software Abstractions for Parallel Architectures“

Performing large, intensive or non-trivial computing on array-like data structures is one of the most common task in scientific computing, video game development and other fields. This matter of fact is backed up by the large number of tools, languages and libraries to perform such tasks. If we restrict ourselves to C++-based solutions, more than a dozen such libraries exists from BLAS/LAPACK C++ binding to template meta-programming-based Blitz++ or Eigen. Even if all of these libraries provide good performance or good abstraction, none of them seems to fit the need of so many different user types. Moreover, as parallel system complexity grows, the need to maintain all those components quickly becomes unwieldy. This talk explores various software design techniques, like Generative Programming, Meta Programming and Generic Programming, and their application to the implementation of a parallel computing librariy in such a way that abstraction and expressiveness are maximized while cost over efficiency is minimized. We’ll skim over various applications and see how they can benefit from such tools. We will conclude by discussing what lessons were learnt from this kind of implementation and how those lessons can translate into new directions for the language itself.

Speaker’s bio: Joel Falcou is an assistant professor at the University Paris-Sud and researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche d’Informatique in Orsay, France. His research focuses on studying generative programming idioms and techniques to design tools for parallel software development. The two main parts of those works are: exploration of Embedded Domain Specific Language design for parallel computing on various architectures and the definition of a formal framework for reasoning about meta-programs and prove their compile-time correctness. Applications range from real-time image processing on embedded architectures to High Performance Computing on multi-core clusters. He is a NumScale SAS scientific advisor. NumScale mission is to assist businesses in the exploration and subsequently the mastery of high-performance computing systems.

Walter E. Brown: “Your Help Wanted: Language Proposals in Flight“

Want to collaborate in designing and implementing a new feature for C++17? Then this session is for you! After reviewing the process by which a new C++ feature enters the language, we will look at one or two of the speaker’s proposals that have received early favorable review from the standards committee, and that are awaiting sample implementation and/or formal wording. Attendee feedback will be solicited, and collaborators will be sought to help bring the proposal(s) to fruition.

Speaker’s bio: With broad experience in industry, academia, consulting, and research, Dr. Walter E. Brown has been a C++ programmer for over thirty years, joining the C++ standards effort in 2000. Among numerous other contributions, he is responsible for introducing such now-standard C++ library features as cbegin/cend and common_type as well as headers <random> and <ratio>, and has significantly impacted such core language features as alias templates, contextual conversions, and variable templates. He conceived and served as project editor for the International Standard on Special Mathematical Functions in C++. When not playing with his grandchildren, Dr. Brown is an Emeritus participant in the C++ standards process, with several more core and library proposals under consideration. He was recently appointed an associate project editor for the C++ standard itself.

Jens Weller and Jon Kalb: “Founding C++ User Groups“

In September “Meeting C++” will have existed for a little more than 2 years. Within those 2 years we went from a few C++ User Groups in Europe to many. We would like to talk about how to continue with founding even more C++ User Groups, but also sharing an overview of the already active User Groups in Europe and the US.

Speakers’ bio: Jens Weller has worked, since 2007, as a freelancer in C++, specialising in consulting, training and programming C++. He started with programming C++ back in 1998. He is an active member of the European C++ community and the founder of the Meeting C++ platform and conference. Jens is an active supporter of C++ user groups and blogs often about C++.

Jon has been programming in C++ for twenty years. He is currently doing this for Amazon’s A9.com. During the last two decades he has written C++ for Amazon, Apple, Dow Chemical, Intuit, Lotus, Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Yahoo! and a number of companies that you’ve never heard of. He taught C++ at the graduate school at Golden Gate University for a couple of years and is currently chair of C++ Now (aka BoostCon) and of the Boost Steering Committee. Jon’s current interest is coming up to speed with C++11/14.