This page has information for individuals presenting at CppCon.

Information here will be useful to individuals that are presenting on-site or online, as part of the main program, an Open Content session, a lightning talk, or a poster. Not all content will pertain to all groups.

Thank you for being part of the CppCon program.

If you have any questions, please send them to Chris Ryan, our Speaker Liaison.

Your Email Address

If you no longer have access to the email address that you used to make your submission topic (due to job change or for any other reason), please contact Chris Ryan, our Speaker Liaison so that he can update your email address in the submission system.

Registration

All speakers must register to attend the conference.

Speakers that are speaking as Open Content and/or Lightning Talk (only) presenters do not have their registration waived.

International Presenters

If you are coming to CppCon from another country to give a Main Program presentation, then feel free to mention that your are an invited speaker in the comments section when you fill out your Visa Application Support Form.

Improving the Review Process

Sched.com

After you’ve been notified that your Sched.com account has been created, please upload a photo of yourself to the account and proofread/update your bio. Whether or not your photo and bio are completed is one of the single biggest drivers of session attendance. If you do not submit a photo we will use whatever image we can find on the internet for you.

Do not overlook how important it is to have a compelling bio. Some presenters want the session’s abstract to speak for itself and/or want a cute/clever/self-deprecating bio. Jon enjoys a full life and writes code in his spare time.

The fact is that the program is full of compelling sessions from compelling speakers. Attendees have a lot of attractive options and a tough decision to make about which sessions to attend. They will consider the presenters’ bios when making this decision. Their conference time is valuable, so they will be looking for presenters that are knowledgable, experienced, and professional.

You can “soften” a dry-sounding résumé and/or to make yourself seem friendly or approachable with humor or informality, but the quality of your bio will be reflected in the turnout for your session.

Meet the Speakers Banquet

All main program on-site speakers (those that submitted and were accepted by the Program Committee) and poster presenters are invited to be our guests at the Meet the Speakers Banquet; however, you must register for it and we will assign your seating.

Promotion

Please let people know that you are speaking! You are the attraction for this year’s CppCon, so let people know on Twitter (#CppCon), Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, or where ever is appropriate for you.

Connecting with others

If you want to engage with other CppCon attendees, including other presenters, please join CppCon Slack workspace. If you are registered for the conference or are a speaker, you should have received an invitation to this workspace. If you have not, please contact Chris Ryan, our Speaker Liaison.

In addition to joining the #sig_speakers_corner channel on the CppCon Slack workspace, consider joining the CppLang Slack workspace #speakerscorner channel by first using the auto-invite page for the CppLang workspace. This is a good way of asking questions of, and getting advice from, experienced presenters at CppCon and other C++ conferences.

Please engage with other attendees. Getting to know your audience is one of the best techniques of presenting.

Slides

Please have a title slide with your talk title and your name as you want them to appear on the recording of your session. Because talk titles do change, Bash Films, who does our physical session recordings, use these slide as definitive for the names of both you and your talk. For our online session recordings, this is less of a concern but consistency is key in maintaining a professional conference.

Gadgets

Speakers don’t want to be interrupted by an audience member’s phone going off in their session, but it is surprising how often speakers forget to turn off their phone.
If you have an Apple Watch, you may not know about theater mode. Theater mode prevents your watch face from lighting up while presenting which is one less distraction for your on-site and video audience.

Practice

If possible, give your talk before a live technical audience. Do it at work and/or with a local user group. You’ll be surprised at what you learn about how long it takes, what you find yourself wishing you’d included, and what questions you get. Pay attention to these issues, learn from them, and incorporate them into your talk. It will improve every time you give it, try to give it as many times as you can arrange an audience.

Crowd Control

If it looks like your room is filling up, please help attendees find a seat. It is much more difficult to spot empty seats from the back of the room than from the front. It is also less intimidating to walk to the front of the room if the speaker has invited you down to fill an empty seat.

If you find that your session is filling and people are standing at the sides or in the back, please ask that attendees “move to the middle” to open up space on the aisles.

Questions

Please be prepared for questions. It is your choice to take them at the end or as you go. Expect to allow five to ten minutes in a one hour talk for questions.

How and why to repeat questions

There are two important reasons to repeat questions. One is that, even if you can hear the question, others may not. They may be seated behind the individual asking the question, so the questioner is facing away from them. Even if everyone in the room can hear the question, it may not be picked up well on the recording. You have a microphone; your version of the question will be clear.

So, if the questioner has a microphone, you don’t need to repeat the question, right? Wrong, because there is another reason to repeat the question (in your own words) and that is to let the questioner and the audience know what you thought was asked. Sometimes it isn’t clear what the questioner is asking. Time spent clarifying a point that was already clear is wasted time. Putting the question in your own words allows the questioner to say, “No, what I’m asking is…”

Not only does it work better to put the question in your own words, it may be smoother to just incorporate the question into the answer. “Yes, we could use a lambda expression here.” This works even if it is a comment rather than a question. “Correct, it would be wrong to use ‘unsigned’ in this case.”

Ending Your Presentation

It isn’t uncommon for content to take longer to deliver than you expect. This is part of the reason that we urge you to practice before a live technical audience. We aren’t so tightly scheduled that (with one important exception–see Half-Hour Sessions) you can’t go over by a minute or two. But do not go beyond that.

If you find that questions are taking you beyond your allotted time, you may cut them off by saying that you’ll continue to take questions, in the hallway, in a future AMA, or by giving a way of contacting you.

You may feel that, since you were speaking before the lunch or dinner break, that you are free to run long. That is not the case. The audience, the volunteers, and the camera operators are all within their rights to expect you to end when you agreed to end. To not do so is rude and not acceptable.

The volunteers have been instructed to cut you off, but they really don’t want to do that. It is awkward for everyone. Practice your session, watch your time, skip the digressions if necessary, and end on time.

Half-Hour Sessions

If you are scheduled to deliver a half-hour session, you help is needed to make the program run smoothly.

First Half

If you are giving the first half-hour, arrive at your session extra early because not only will you need to get your AV setup and checked, the following presenter will need to be setup and checked as well. Please let the following speaker get set up and checked before you, so you’ll be setup and ready to go for your talk.

It is very important that you start on time, so that you be able to finish on time. Finishing on time means finishing with questions as well. You need to be off-mic and unplugged at the end of your half-hour so the following speaker will have their full session to present. If you want to offer to take more questions in the hallway, please say that you’ll be available after the next speaker is finished, not during that speaker’s session.

If you are scheduled for the first of a pair of half-hour talks, you cannot go over our time. You must stop when your time is up. There are no exception to this, even if your sessions started late through no fault of your own.

Second Half

If you are giving the second half-hour, arrive early before the session before yours starts. You need to be checked out on AV before the first presenter(s) setup for their talk. Since you need to allow at least ten minutes for the other speaker to be setup, you need to arrive in time so that you can be finished being setup (including necessary troubleshooting) at least forty-five minutes before your session is scheduled to begin.

It is understandable that right before speaking you might be too nervous to sit quietly through their talk (although that might help calm your nerves). If you can’t avoid pacing, please slip out of the session, but not far away. You’ll need to be available right after the previous speaker finishes to get set up and going.

Slides

Better safe than sorry: Your laptop may break or go missing. Consider:

• Have copy of your slides on a USB stick.
• Mail yourself a copy of the slides.
• Put a copy on Google drive/Dropbox/iCloud.

YouTube

The largest part of your audience is the CppCon YouTube Channel. You may have two or three hundred onsite and/or online viewers of your live presentation, but view counts for recordings are in the thousands. Even the least viewed sessions have thousands of views. You can read the CppCon Video Content Policy, which explains why we value the channel and having a healthy commenting environment.

Since this is our largest audience we want to put some effort into optimizing for this audience and YouTube’s heuristics for recommending videos. YouTube’s recommendation heuristics are undocumented, but here is what we’ve observed that drives recommendations:

• Video Views. Videos with lots of views, particularly recent views, get recommended for yet more views.
  • This is why we want to have a single copy of your session recording on YouTube. A single recording with 50K views will be recommended more that either of two identical recordings with 25K views. See the CppCon Video Content Policy.
  • This is why we want to announce the publication of each new video with social media to get it some quick attention. Quick attention builds on itself. You can help by providing us with your twitter addresses and posting appropriate announcements of your video when it is published.
• Channel Content. Videos on good channels get recommended.
  • Good channels are channels that release high-view count videos in a regular pattern.
  • This is why we have adopted the “Power Release” model.
    • We (publicly) release only one video per day. This pace is optimal for the channel and means that we are releasing new content for almost half the year.
    • We’ll provide you with the unlisted URL to your video when it is available so that you can share it in a blog post or on social media.
• Comments, the more and the more recent, the better.
  • An active commenting community on a channel or particular video is great for recommendations. YouTube comments are famously awful, but channel’s don’t turn off commenting because active commenting drives views.
  • The CppCon YouTube channel has professional comment moderation (provided by Digital Medium) so that discussion stays focused on the technical content.
  • Please register with Digital Medium’s YouTube Comment Forwarding System feature. Whenever a comment is approved for any of your videos, you’ll be notified by email of that comment. You are not obligated to do anything in response, but if you respond in a timely manner to each comment (even if only to say “Thanks for your kinds words.”). You’ll be helping to build a healthy commenting eco-system. Timely comment responses from presenters yield:
    • More comments. When commenters see that presenters are making timely responses, they are more likely to leave comments.
    • More civil comments. When commenters see that presenters are reading the comments they are more likely to express themselves professionally. (Of course rude comments are never seen, due to moderation, but people are always kinder when talking about people when they know those people are listening.)
    • Furthering your audience reach. Comments allow you to correct, clarify, and expand on your topic.
    • More views. Actively commenting means more views which help your video and the entire channel.
• Metadata, the title, abstract, and keywords which match search terms.
  • Search engines can sometimes appear to be magical, but at their heart, they are pretty simple: matching search terms.
  • Title
    • This means that a clever title like: Things To Look For in a Code Review, may be hard to find appropriate matches, because it really isn’t about Code Reviews, it is about code smells that can be overlooked. It would easier to match if the title reflected exactly which code smells will be discussed in the video. But that isn’t as interesting a title.
    • This creates a tension. Should you, as a presenter, make an interesting title to attract conference attendees or should you Search Engine Optimize your title? Our approach is to let you create the title that you think is more compelling to attendees. The schedule and video title card will reflect this. But the actually YouTube video title, will be whatever the Digital Medium team (who are really good at YouTube SEO) thinks will work best to generate recommendations.
  • Abstract
    • Write your abstract to be compelling to potential attendees, but don’t hesitate to include appropriate matching words for potential searches.
  • Keywords
    • In your submission we ask for keywords that help with scheduling (we don’t schedule sessions with any keyword collisions), so we look for high-level keywords. We don’t want to schedule two multithreading sessions at the same time even if they are focused on different aspects of multithreading. So we don’t need micro-focused keywords.
    • But for video metadata, we can’t get enough micro-focused keywords, so when you submission is accepted, we’ll ask you for “video” keywords, where we’ll ask you to give a list of any words that might be used to search for a talk like yours.

Advice from Bash Films

Bash is company that records, edits, and uploads our videos. Here is their advice to presenters.

Advice from Scott Meyers

Here is Scott’s take on presenting code from his 2014 keynote at Meeting C++. (Thanks Jens.)

Advice from Meeting C++ (Jens Weller)

Here is a page of advice from the organizer of the Meeting C++ conference and user groups. Here is a great collection of lightning talks on presenting.

Advice from Phil Nash on online presentations

Phil Nash presents the How to Talk Into the Void series. This series provides helpful advice about doing online presentations.

Local Audio (for online presenters)

If you made a local audio recording and have not already uploaded it, please do so ASAP: https://www.dropbox.com/request/hvZjAEGz0hgc9gIOZbeb

Presentation Files

Here is the information about submitting your slides and/or source from the Conference Archivists, Kern, Daniel and Zoe:

Hi Folks!

Thanks for speaking at CppCon this year!

To have your files added to the repository of slides, send us a link or attachment (if they are small) to speaker-files@cppcon.org.

*** Please name your slide files as follows: ***

Presentation Title – Speaker Name – CppCon 2021

Please avoid special characters in the filename, such as: \/:*?”<>|. For example, Herb Sutter’s keynote slides from 2017 would be named “Meta – Thoughts on Generative C++ – Herb Sutter – CppCon 2017.pdf”.

If possible, please submit your slides in PDF format. This will allow the widest group of people to read them easily. If that’s not possible, you may also submit PowerPoint (.ppt/.pptx) files and zipped folders containing Keynote or HTML. If you have any questions, please email speaker-files@cppcon.org and ask.

For source code, a zip or tar.gz is fine. Please do not include large files, and please ensure that all files can be distributed by CppCon to the public. You may mark your code as being placed in the public domain, or include a suitable license. The Boost Software License is preferred, but other open source licenses including, but not limited to, BSD, MIT, Apache, LGPL, or GPL are also acceptable. We are relying on you to ensure the code is licensed appropriately.

Feel free to add links to other resources you may have referenced during your talk and we will add them to the README.md page for your talk.

Thanks and enjoy the rest of the conference!

Kern Handa
Daniel Hanson
Zoe Carver
Presenter File Archivists, CppCon 2021