The conference is asking for instructors to submit proposals for classes to be taught in conjunction with next September’s CppCon 2016.
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.
One of the big surprises last year at CppCon was the tremendous response to the lightning talks. People kept submitting them, and we just kept adding sessions. This year, we’re adding those sessions in advance as the submissions come in, so that you can plan to attend. (And yes, you can still submit a talk. We have time slots we can hold more lightning talk sessions in.) We’ve just added two more sessions – Tuesday lunch and Wednesday morning – to accommodate the submissions already received. You’ll see the lightning talk sessions in yellow on the program. The abstract is vague, and it’s not going to get less vague. You don’t know precisely what you’re going to get until you show up.
What roughly will you get? A number of different talks – some funny, some very technical, some personal, some inspirational, some that will make your grateful you have the job you do and not the speaker’s job. Some will be 5 minutes long and some 15 minutes long. A few might be followups to something that’s already happened. Others might be a way to invite you to something that hasn’t happened yet. Some will be the very first public speaking that speaker has ever done, and some will be a chance to let your hair down with a speaker you’ve seen being serious many times before. Some might not interest you, but that’s ok – they’re short, you can be bored for 5 or 15 minutes, and then there will be a different one. They’re little bite size goodies, and for many of us they were a very enjoyable highlight of the conference. Add some to your schedule now, and be prepared to get up a little early or stay on site a little late to get the full benefit of your time here!
Last year’s CppCon brought together ISO Standard Committee members and game developers to discuss how standard C++ could evolve to better support C++. This resulted in the formation of Study Group 14: Game Dev and Low Latency at the ISO meeting in Lenexa this spring. The SG14 charter is “improving C++ for Low Latency, real time requirements, and performance/efficiency especially for Games, Financial/Banking, and Simulations.”
Some papers have already been discussed by the Study Group, but the first formal meeting of SG14 will be hosted by CppCon this year on Wednesday, September 23rd. This one-day meeting is open to anyone interested, but requires a separate registration (it isn’t covered by a regular conference registration). A second meeting is already set up on March 14-18 2016 at GDC 2015 hosted by Sony (thank you, Sony). The meeting will be run by Michael Wong, the SG14 chair.
For more information on SG14, the meeting, and how best to register for it, please read Michael’s blog post about it.
If you would like to attend CppCon 2015, 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.
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, 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. This is a particularly great opportunity for locals with an interest in C++. If you are interested or would like more information, please email volunteers@cppcon.org.
The response to last year’s Call for Lightning Talks was so strong that this year we are adding a second evening session, so plan on joining us for the fun on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.
Lightning talks are 5 or 15 minutes talks on any topic that will be interesting to C++ programmers. Expect fast paced fun with talks that are funny or intriguing from speakers at all experience levels.
If you’ve never seen a lightning talk before checkout some of last year’s on our YouTube channel. They cover a single topic and they start with the good stuff and make a point. Anyone can do one, but be sure to practice because 5 minutes goes by incredibly fast and 15 minutes isn’t much easier. If there’s one technique you wish everyone knew, one little known fact that should be well known, one tool that makes your life easier every day, or a collection of little things that you can fit into 5 or 15 minutes, you can propose a lighting talk, and you should.
Anyone can submit a talk, you don’t need to be a conference speaker (or even a registered attendee). We are looking for talks from experienced speakers, but also new speakers and students. To submit a talk, just email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us what you want to talk about, what length you need (5 or 15 minutes), and a little bit about yourself (one sentence is fine). Even if you don’t plan to submit, plan to attend, it’s sure to be fun!
This year CppCon is increasing the number of Open Content sessions. In addition to the early morning and evening sessions offered last year, we’ll also be offering Open Content session over the lunch break.
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 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.
To propose a session, simply email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us the title, description, and speaker(s)/moderators(s). 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 on Monday can’t do an open session Monday evening.)
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 evening/lunch sessions, including proposing or leading a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.
For now, please email your submissions as soon as you can so that our planning work can get underway. See you in Bellevue!
Our contacts at the official conference hotels are predicting that, like last year, all hotel rooms in Bellevue will be booked.
Currently three of our four hotel blocks are full. The Marriott still has some rooms that we’ve reserved for attendees. Originally they had agreed to hold these rooms (at a conference discounted rate) until this Friday, but they’ve agree to extend the deadline to Monday (August 24th) at noon (west coast time).
We strongly encourage anyone planning to attend this year’s conference to book your room right away.
We are announcing the second keynote for next month’s conference.
Sean Parent, principal scientist at Adobe, 
will be continuing his “Better Code” keynote series from last year’s C++Now keynote (on complete types) with “Better Code: Data Structures.”
Abstract: The standard library containers are often both misused and underused. Instead of creating new containers, applications are often structured with incidental data structures composed of objects referencing other object. This talk looks at some of the ways the standard containers can be better utilized and how creating (or using non-standard library) containers can greatly simplify code. The goal is no incidental data structures.
Speakers bio: Sean Parent is a principal scientist and software architect for Adobe’s mobile digital imaging group. Sean has been at Adobe since 1993 when he joined as a senior engineer working on Photoshop and later managed Adobe’s Software Technology Lab. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple’s successful transition to PowerPC.
Most of this fall’s program is already online, but we are still working on it. Today we are announcing three new sessions and a panel.
Herb Sutter will be presenting “Writing Good C++14 By Default.” Herb’s session will build on Bjarne Stroustrup’s keynote of the previous day on “Writing Good C++14.”
Chandler Carruth, C++ Language and Compiler Lead at Google, will be presenting “Tuning C++: Benchmarks, and Compilers, and CPUs! Oh My!”
Sumant Tambe will be presenting “Reactive Stream Processing in Industrial IoT using DDS and Rx.cpp,” which includes a live demo of a distributed complex event processing system for Internet of Things.
Our Monday evening panel will be “Grill the Committee,” featuring the opportunity for audience members to question members of the ISO C++ committee. We’ve not yet identified the panel members, but last year’s panel featured a dozen committee members and we’ll have a similar panel this year.
The CppCon 2015 Program is now (mostly) available with talk titles, abstracts, and speakers. The program contains over 100 one-hour sessions by over 80 speakers including many speakers returning from last year’s very successful program as well as many new voices. Not all sessions are announced yet, but we have announced our opening keynote by C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup on Writing Good C++14.
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!