conferences
CPPNorth2024!
July 21-24 2024
It’s my third year at CppNorth! Woohoo!! The organizers are so awesome, every year they make it even more memorable! Such a wide and diverse group of people that all love programming, once again, it’s been a blast!
Let’s go!
Travel
This time I took my car to drive from Montréal on the Sunday. My family is going to join me on Wednesday (by train!) so we can enjoy Toronto a bit, and even Niagara falls, cool!
It all went very smooth so I could practice my talk during the 6 hour drive, but had a hard time trying to find an ‘opening statement’ that would do justice to the rest of the talk…hehe… we’ll see in the video if it went well, I think I forgot to say “Fasten your seat belts as we’re going to have a heck of a ride!” (I usually talk a little too fast, hehe)
Sunday Reception
As per the tradition, we are all invited to a Sunday reception in the Hotel, to get our badges and meet our new friends for the next 3 days! The place is packed with very good and motivated speakers/attendees, it’s a pleasure to see them returning for another round :-)
After the reception, I looked for a place to relax and fortunately there was a great little bar right across the street! The Loose Moose would then become our after-hour place to sit and enjoy a little programming discussion!
But since Toronto is such a beautiful city at night, I strolled to the pier (hehe) and watched the illuminated spectacle, taking a moment to realize what a crazy week it’s going to be…
Monday, Day 1!
First time inside the venue, we are at the CIBC Square building, at the 44th floor, and the view is amazing!
Special thanks to Fatemeh Jafargholi for getting us inside the Msft headquarters :)
And we start with an amazing few words from our CoC chair Karen Connelly, setting the tone for the rest of the conference. She made us look at each other for 2 seconds with eye contacts and making us understand that we all come from different backgrounds, carry different ‘backpacks’, but yet, we all share the same passion. Truly inspiring!
Then the Classic Keynote from Kate Gregory, it’s something of a tradition now, all of the attendees were eager for it, and she delivered! The Aging Programmer, a simple problem that we all have to face; aging. Filled with kind advices and tips to encourage our younger selves to take care of our body, before we realize that we are losing some abilities. But all is not lost! She also reminded us about the importance of adapting ourselves and to keep on moving :-)
Then I went to see ‘C++ is a meta compiler’ by Daniel Nikpayuk. For me, he’s the only real native here. He is from Inuvik, a very ancient and northern community of Canada. His talk showed how to create a DSL (Domain specific language) using C++ to help with multimedia/storytelling generation. I’m very honored and proud to have shared a few words with him, and grateful for him to share his ideas and passions.
After some very good lunch, and an afternoon filled with great talks (oh yeah, I had mine during this afternoon, hehe, A gaussian splatting viewer made to learn about this new 3D scene modeling technology. Oh, and went to learn coroutines at the same time, really fun times! I think it went well, although a little short in 60 minutes, I had to rush on a lot of things because I had too much content! Sorry!), some of us went to the Belonging dinner!
Negar Farjadnia made a little presentation where she shared her story, and how an immigrant from Iran with little money, 2 suitcases and barely no contacts in Toronto, managed to get a job in IT and grow a 15 years career as a security expert. Absolutely great, inspiring and very easy to speak with! (I ate at the same table, hehe)
At the end of the day, no one wanted to get out of the venue! (The security people thought otherwise, hehe) As we had to get out, we found a little group to go continue the conversations elsewhere. This is the greatest part of this conference, as big your CV is or as impressive your career is, it’s always easy to talk to anyone and engage in any types of conversations! I needed to go prepare the lightning talks for the next morning so had to close the day pretty early. Yes morning LT sessions!
Tuesday, Day 2!
The day begins with… me being the Lightning Talks host!! What an honor for the organizers to think about me! I was supposed to have a maximum of 15 sessions but could not cut anyone as all the content was great, so 18 talks in 90 minutes, woohoo! The pace was really rapid fire (good luck AV for editing this!), I had prepared a little quiz game for in-betweens, but didn’t have time for much, I preferred to let the speakers shine here! I had the goal of being everyone’s morning coffee and I think it worked, I didn’t see any yawning! Good!
Here’s the schedule for the rest of my second day at CppNorth:
- … + CTAD + NTTP = 🤩 by Miro Knejp
- Why Modules? : It’s not about build time by Steve Downey
- More Ranges Please by Roi Barkan
- Uplifting Your Career as a Youth in Tech by Sohaila Ali
- Advent of Code - Behind the Scenes by Eric Wastl
Do I have to tell you that these were all amazing?? Miro showing us some real prowess using ‘…’ and creating some beautiful code for domain modeling, I’ll steal those ideas! Steve talking about one of my favorite subjects….modules of course! And what about ranges, I love ranges!! And now I love them even more! Oh but have you heard of Sohaila Ali? She’s 17 and has already attended more conference then most of the people in the room! It was really inspiring to see her describe the beginning of her journey, and we could see the attendance wanting more, we had an almost 20 minutes Q&A at the end, what a lovely surprise!
Oh and that keynote to end the day? Wow… a perfect speaker for a perfect subject, coding challenges for everyone! Eric is a really lovely and fun person, and the Advent of Code he created helps so many people is so many different ways. The week after I came back from CppNorth we organized a little 2 hour fun by trying the 2023 day 1 challenge. We were 7 coders in different technologies, and had 7 different implementations! Amazingly inspiring! Thank you Eric!
Tired? Not at all! It seems we were all in great spirits and went to see our little moose friend to get something to eat, and still talk a lot about programming with Tristan Brindle and Miro, thank you for your company!!
Wednesday, Day 3 :’(
All good things have to come to an end they say? Meh I don’t want this to end! :_( Time flies so quickly in these situations. I realize that it might be my last opportunity to talk with as many people as I can, so I jump on lonely people and try to have everyone have a good time!
And it started with a banger! April Wensel’s keynote about compassionate coding hit the right spot! We need to become even more human that we’ve ever been with this AI craze….
The rest of the day flew so quickly, after a talk by Arne Berger on type systems, we got to get lunch on our own. There was a little(!) food court close by and went for some delicious sushi!
And then after a talk about ranges, loops and algorithms where Peter Lorimer and Fatemeh Jafargholi showed us different techniques to modify code from loops to algos, yay, I went to see a talk from Alex Dathskovsky on C++ memory model. It was packed with very good and in-depth information on how the memory is used, especially when atomics are used. It helped me understand a lot more about the problems I had with ‘relaxed’ memory models! Thank You!
But the end is really coming soon… The last keynote is up, the 1 thing by Tony Van Eerd. It was the perfect balance of philosophy/design/coding practices/humor/passion that we now expect of Tony ;-)
The conference is over… but not the friendship and feeling of community that grows every year I go to Toronto.
What I will remember from this year’s edition… is once again the people!. I love this community so much!
At the end of the day, it was very hard for me to have to say goodbye. My family was coming for some vacation time, and we were fortunate enough to have Miro Knejp have dinner, and brunch with us!
I hope to see you all again for another great edition next year!! Thank you, Caring Passionate People!