SLS2026 - The Symposium

The Venue

The first Shading Languages Symposium was hosted by Qualcomm in the Sorrento Valley of San Diego. It immediately proceeded Vulkanised 2026 in the same lecture theatre on the Qualcomm campus.

It was a fantastic lecture theatre, and from a speakers perspective, the A/V setup was really great. I must also commend the food provided by the event. On the second day, I decided to forgo breakfast at the hotel in favour of the superior breakfast provided by the event.

A good way to describe the location is a “Business Suburb” of San Diego. It is about a 20-30 minute drive from the actual city of San Diego. This made actually traveling in and out of San Diego in my free time fairly expensive, and time consuming.

The Attendees

As you can see from the picture above, we didn’t quite fill out the lecture theatre. There were around 60 attendees there which is probably the smallest conference I have ever attended. A few of us were even joking that it could be possible that half of the attendees were speakers! This small attendance did mean that there was a huge density in terms of experience and knowledge which basically meant every time I got chatting with someone new, I would learn many new things.

Despite the small attendance, there also seemed to be a fairly wide variety of backgrounds represented. There were:

• Compiler engineers
• Hardware/Driver engineers
• University professors
• University students
• Game engine programmers
• Game programmers
• Tools programmers

And probably many more that I am missing/forgetting. It was especially interesting chatting to the compiler engineers. Up to this point, the closest to compiler programming that I have got is following along with Crafting Interpreters, so it was great to pick their brains on the challenges they face, and to share my experiences as a user of programming languages.

The Event

The event consisted of a single track of 30-minute talks. After 2 or 3 talks there would be a break for people stretch their legs, grab some food, and chat. Each talk was also streamed into the main break room where the company stands were. This was quite nice in the event that you wanted to keep an eye on a talk, but didn’t feel the need to go into the lecture theatre.

At the end of the event, there was a 1-hour panel which was pretty great and I would encourage anyone interested in graphics programming to give it a watch.