Tag: conferences

Meeting C++ 2019 summary

A fellow colleague and me had the pleasure to attend this years Meeting C++ 2019 from November 14th-16th in Berlin. It was my second visit and a quite interesting and insightful one. Therefore I would like to give a short summary and share some of my take-aways.

General impressions

The organization and venue were great and everything from booking, catering and the talks went smoothly. The C++ Community is very professional and communication is very friendly and open. I am once again impressed that they openly addressed diversity problems, promoted and enforced a code of conduct and the like.

The social events, the legendary C++-Quiz (many thanks again to Diego) and the lightning talks provided relaxing counterparts to the hard technical stuff.

The keynotes

Design Rationale for <chrono> (Howard Hinnant)

The author of the new time- and date API <chrono> coming in C++20 presented the design and showed many examples of how to use it. While this keynote was very technical and maybe missing stories and jokes you often see in keynotes it was extremely interesting and insightful for me. The design and usage of the library is super-elegant and two elements really stood out for me:

  1. Let the API user decide. More concretely the <chrono> library lets the programmer decide on an case-by-case basis what to do with overruns and illegal dates when making calculations. For example, what should happen if you add 1 year to february 29th? What if you add 1 month to the last day of October? <chrono> does not make that decision for you but lets you check if the date is legal and allows you to easily snap to the correct date, make an overflow to the next month or just throw an error.
  2. Find the essence of your domain. The calendar implementation in <chrono> is based on the insight, that a calendar is only a collection of dates with unique names. So the most simple and canonical calendar (called sys_days) simply counts the days since 01.01.1970. Other calendars only need conversions from/to sys_days to be fully interoperable. Most other calendar APIs include time of day which often causes problems when doing calculations.

Can AI replace programmers? (Frances Buontempo)

Entertaining and interesting talk about the history, definition, types and current state of artificial intelligence. The core of todays AI is mostly about automation of non-trivial tasks. The interaction of real people in the feedback loop is totally mandatory today and this will stay so for quite some time. In addition the resulting code/artifacts are often totally incomprehensible for human beings.

Crazy Code and Crazy Coders (Walter E. Brown)

Very entertaining talk with tons of hair-raising real-life code examples. Walter used them not only to entertain but to bring attention to us programmers that we all bear a ton of responsibility for our code because we simply do not know where it will end up in a few years. So we absolutely must deal with it in a professional way or bad things will happen.

Other noteworthy stuff

There were of course a lot more great and interesting talks, so check out the slides or watch last years talks on youtube until this years are available. I just want to mention a few I personally attended and found worthwhile:

  • Combining C++17 Features in Practice – Nicolai Josuttis
  • The C++20 Synchronization Library – Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
  • CPU design effects that can degrade performance of your programs – Jakub Beranek
  • Value Propositon: Allocator-Aware Software – John Lakos
  • Modules are Coming – Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
  • Better Algorithm Intuition – Conor Hoekstra
  • Squaring the circle: value-oriented design in an object-oriented system – Juan Pedro Bolívar Puente

The following two lightning talks stood out for me and are easily relatable by polyglot programmers:

Conclusion

This years Meeting C++ was a well-rounded event. I am very glad that I could attend again and got a lot of new input and impulses that will surely affect my day-to-day work – not only in C++ projects.

Recap of the Schneide Dev Brunch 2016-04-10

If you couldn’t attend the Schneide Dev Brunch at 10th of April 2016, here is a summary of the main topics.

brunch64-borderedLast sunday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on the second sunday of every other (even) month, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. In case you miss the recap article about the february brunch: It didn’t happen. We all took a break, but are on track again. So if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were quite a lot of developers this time, so we had enough stuff to talk about. As usual, a lot of topics and chatter were exchanged. This recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

Why software development conferences?

We began with a curious question: Why are there even conferences about software development? You can read most of the content for free on the internet and even watch the talks afterwards. So why attend one for a lot of money? We discussed the topic a bit and came up with an analysis:
There are (at least) four different interested groups in a conference:

  • The organizer or commercial host is mostly interested in a positive revenue. As long as there’s a possibility for some net gain, somebody will host a conference. The actual topic is a secondary matter for them (this might explain some of the weirder conferences out there, like the boring conference).
  • The developers that really attend a conference are a small subset of all developers. They all have their own personal motives to pay money and invest time and inconviences to be there in person. Some might rely on the quality filter of a conference board, some are looking forward to meet their peers in an annual ritual. There might be those that can learn best if somebody talk-feeds them the topic. Whatever reason, a lot of developers enjoy participating at conferences. If it happens to be paid by the employer and booked as worktime, who would not?
  • Then there are the speakers. They have the additional burden to convince a committee of their topic, prepare a talk of high quality and be able to perform on stage (something that is harder than it looks). The speakers seek reputation and credible proof of expertise. His resume will probably profit, too.
  • And at last, the companies that sponsor the conference, maintain a booth with big roll-ups and smiling employees and give their developers a chance to attend are in the game to represent, to recruit and build their brand. A lot of traditional marketing effort goes into trade fairs, so why not treat the developer market like any other and be present in the developer fairs?

We can conclude that software development conferences can provide value for every associated stakeholder. As long as this sentence holds true, conferences will be held.
The question didn’t came out of the blue: one of our attendees got accepted as a speaker on the Karlsruher Entwicklertag 2016 and wanted to learn about the different expectations he needs to address. He will give his talk on the next Dev Brunch to practice the flow and to pass the hardest critics. The topic: git internals. We are thrilled!

Stratagems and strategies

The next topic contained another talk, not at a conference, but in the context of a “general topics” series at a local university (the Duale Hochschule in Karlsruhe). The talk introduces the concept of the 36 stratagems and of modern strategies to the audience. We talked a bit about the concept itself and found that the list of logical fallacies is somewhat similar. We even found an application of the stratagems in local history (sorry, only german source found): The Bretten’s Hundle
The talk itself is this monday, so you’ll need to hurry if you want to attend.

Psychology of deception

As often during the dev brunch, one topic led to the other, and we soon talked about morale and ethics. The concept of micro-expressions to reveal the hidden agenda of others came up, as well as the TV series “lie to me” that is inspired by the work of Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology. There even is a commercial training program to improve your skill of “spotting the liar”.

Games with morale aspects

Well, we are nerds. While crime investigation is thrilling, there is the even more enthralling topic of games with psychological and moralistic aspects. We soon exchanged our experiences with games like “Haze” or “Spec Ops: The Line”. But it doesn’t stop at shooter games, you can have similar insights by playing “Papers, Please” (a strong favorite for one of our next Schneide game nights) or “This War Of Mine”. You can even try some multiplayer games specifically designed for social insights, like “The Ship: Murder Party”.
And if you haven’t got much time but still want to learn something about yourself, little games like “60 Seconds!” are a great start.
This topic lead to some ideas for upcoming Schneide game nights in 2016.

Book review: A tour of C++

One attendee of the brunch provided a summary of the book “A Tour of C++” from Bjarne Stroustrup, that recently got updated to the language possibilities of C++ 11. In his words, the book is a rather incomplete introduction to the language, with way too many aspects described in a way too short manner. It’s more of a reading list to really grasp the concepts, so it may serve as a source of inspiration. For example, the notion of “move semantics” was explained, but to discover the consequences is up to the developer. The part about template programming was well done and every chapter has a suitable list of advices in the tradition of “Effective XYZ” at the end. So it’s not a bad book, but too short to be satisfying. It’s like a tourist’s tour around C++ 11, so the title holds its promise.

The left-pad incident

When we finished the “official” agenda, the topic of the recent left-pad incident came up and left us laughing. We really live in glorious times when the happiness of the (Javascript) world depends on a few lines of code. Not that this couldn’t happen in any other ecosystem.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.