ACCU On Sea 2026 - The Conference

The Talks

ACCU on Sea is not strictly a C++ conference, though it is known as one because 90% of the talks are C++ based. Aside from C++ there were talks on Rust, C, and even LISP.

There were a wide variety of talk lengths. Most sessions were 90 minutes in length. Some were 60 minutes. There were also some sessions that consisted of 3, 20 minute talks that were given back-to-back.

At the end of the first 3 days of the conference there was an hour long session of lightning talks, hosted by Pete Goodliffe. I enjoyed these so much last year, that I made sure that I got involved with it this year.

The Structure

Most days started off with a morning address to go through all the updates and give people links and general information about the conference. As an aside, Rare paid for me to go to ACCU on Sea, which meant that we were put down as a “Travel and Teams Partner”, so it was really cool to see Rare up on the screen every day :)

Then there was usually a morning keynote. Throughout the day, talks would be given in 1 of the 5 rooms with decent breaks in between for lunch, with the lightning talks ending at around 6:30pm/7pm. Following the lightning talks there were evening events which would typically end at around 9:30/10pm.

This sounds like a huge amount going on, and it was. Days started at 9am, and if you engaged with all the events, most days did not end until 10pm.

Evening Events

On every evening (except the last day), there was some kind of special event on.

Tuesday

Before the main conference began on Wednesday, there was an evening night of drinks. This was very informal and functioned as a time to get your badges before the conference, and meet and chat with people while you did it. I met some old friends from last year’s ACCU at this event, and met some new people.

Wednesday

Undo hosted a C++ quiz. I totally intended to attend this… BUT there were free drinks and pizza provided an hour prior to it starting which led to a lot of chatting with people out on a balcony. There were maybe 8 of us who just chatted all the way to the end of the day and completely missed the start of the quiz. From what I have heard about the quiz it was a fun evening!

Thursday

Walter Brown hosted a film night. This was a 2 hour session which involved a compilation of videos about the history of computing in general. One of these videos was Atanasoff: Father of The Computer which talked about the ABC, how it predated the ENIAC, and the impact that that had on our industry as a whole. It was a pretty damn good documentary and if you have a free 45 minutes, you could do worse than watch it. While this movie night was going on, there were also some kebabs provided by Think-Cell which were pretty good.

Friday

This was the speaker’s dinner. The dinner was held in std::cout. It was pretty nice being able to get up and go to the balcony off this room to see the sea at night. The food was excellent. I always enjoy these dinners at ACCU.

Then after the dinner was over a group of us went to one of the nearby hotels for some post drinks. It was a fantastic evening