The Conference

Attendees

CppCon, much like the venue, is a large conference. It isn’t on the same scale as the Game Developers Conference or SIGGRAPH, but in comparison to other C++ conferences that I have been to, it is quite big. The majority of people I spoke to were either working in high frequency trading (or were in some way involved with financial solutions) or robotics. Though the entire conference wasn’t solely filled by people working in these sectors. I also met some game dev people, academics, consultants, students, fellow Microsoft peeps, etc etc.

One thing I asked almost everyone I met was “Is this your first time at CppCon?”. In most cases, this was people’s first CppCon, just like it was my first. The majority of people who had been before were people more involved in the committee, or were fairly well known speakers. I thought this was quite interesting. It gave the impression to me that people just try to come to once and that is enough for them. Or perhaps their company’s want to be fair and let others attend in successive years? I am personally hoping that I am able to go to CppCon again :) Twas a blast. I also got the impression that the conference committee is also trying to put some effort into getting people to come back. Jon Kalb (Conference Chair) throughout the conference would come over and start chatting with people and at the end would say what must have been his catchphrase, “Come back next year, and bring your friends… and enemies”. This was funny I must admit.

Structure of the Days

CppCon is probably the most demanding conference I have been to. Each day ran from 9am at the latest, to 10pm. Some days started at 7:30am. In return for the long days, there were decent breaks in between each session, and a 2 hour break for lunch. Though most days did have sessions during lunch if you wanted to go to them. Partially due to the long days, I very rarely stayed up to socialize passed 10pm. I think I only stayed out on 2 of the days. On the other days I just stumbled to my bed for 10:15pm.

Conference Dinners

I was able to attend 3 of the dinners that were provided by either the conference or the sponsors:

1. European Networking Dinner by think-cell
2. Community Dinner, sponsored by Bloomberg
3. Speaker’s Dinner

These were great for two reasons:

1. I didn’t have to buy dinner
2. Got to chat with a lot of cool people :)

I particularly liked the Community Dinner. As part of the Community Dinner, each table had to come up with an idea to get more people to come to conferences and engage with the community. We then had to create a slide in a deck with that idea, and then present the idea at the end of the dinner.

My table came up with the brilliant idea of “Create a C++ tiktok account where we get the LEAST media trained C++ celebrity to post tiktoks”. Even as a non-tiktok user, this sounded pretty funny to me, but was also a fairly serious idea. The C++ community probably could benefit from a presence on TikTok. Unfortunately I did not get to hear many of the ideas from the other tables because I had to dash to the first night of the lightning talks which I spoke at.

Care Package for Speakers

I don’t know if this was something special that CppCon did this year, or if this is a common thing, but I have spoke at a couple of different conferences, and this is the first time that a conference has sent me a care package

This was really nice to get in the post about a month or so after the end of the conference. The goodies have been eaten, and the letter has been saved. Very much appreciated!