conferences
disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the composition of this page, only human errors, bad grammar and lots of exclamation points waiting, thank you!! (oh and big images, I didn’t resize them, so… sorry for download time!)
CPPNorth2025!
July 20-23 2025
It’s my fourth year at CppNorth! Woohoo!!
Let’s go!
Travel
By car once again! Only 6 hours, but this time with my wife! We went to see the Blue Jay win the Satursday baseball game, what a nice day!
Sunday Reception
Sunday was the real day the conference started!
By using the CppNorth channel, I got to eat with a group of 4 at a hotel nearby, meeting Léo Ghafari, Braden Ganetsky and Floris Bob van Elzelingen. I was so happy because I knew that if it would be so easy to meet new people even before the conference started, we would have a blast once it does!
Then I went to see the volunteer’s training in the afternoon and was impressed not only by the venue, the volunteers and the staff of the St-James conference center, but mainly by the amount of preparation Braden Ganetsky had put into this! I think that everyone will agree that the volunteers made a real difference in making everyone’s job easier and the conference run smoother. Thank you Braden and all the volunteers!!!
I got back to the hotel to start harassing people for Lightning Talks which would come on tuesday and soon it was time for the official reception.
Food was great and already we could feel the energy of the place! People started arriving continuously and I couldn’t keepup to try and greet them all! We got the see the rooms and facilities that we would use for the next days. I was so happy to see some speakers that didn’t make the cut but came by anyway! It’s a good sign that we have content that people want to see/hear about!
Monday, Day 1!
A Great thing about CppNorth this year is that breakfast is included! Everyone gathers for a quick coffee and we are starting!!
After a quick and effective words from Karen Connelly and Mike Daum, we greet Kate Gregory for her annual Keynote. More than a tradition, it has become the landmark of the conference. People were quoting her all week long. Once again such a relevant talk about how to change the world by changing our worlds one little good action at the time. Truly inspiring!
Already time for the first talk of the day; Taming a beast using onnx runtime in AAA games by Jean-Simon Lapointe. Absolutely great. I really need to re-watch this one, I thought he was showing us how to integrate ONNX in a codebase all along, but as I was digesting it at close to midnight, I realized that I was thinking so much about his talk because he didn’t show me how to integrate this library in a codebase.
He show all of us how Great Project Management works!! It was a great way to show us how applied software engineering should be done at all levels. Thank you Jean-Simon!
Lunch was provided by the conference, excellent variety of plates, good times to talk with amazing people!!
Then, after a great afternoon of both technical and non-technical talks, there was a surprise keynote by the one and only… Tony Van Eerd! Shoudld we check for Null? Now we all know the correct answer…. “it depends”!! Again, an awesome plunge into the real world, with simple questions, entertaining essays, and engaging responses. We should all thank Tony for another thought provoking talk! I can’t wait for contracts now! (only to have others ignore them! haha!)
Monday was packed! We finished with the belonging dinner, with a mindful talk by Seavey van Walsum, University of Toronto, Human Centred Data Science Masters Student. Wow, what an appropriate title in those times! Altough not long enough for me, I loved every minute of her talk! How to center the human through our computer centric society is getting very difficult, this is just another example on how open to each other we shoud be.
After an eventful day (seems like i’ve been here already for 1 week!) we retreated with a couple of fellow friends for drinks at a local venue ;)
Tuesday, Day 2!
The second day will be memorable! I will be the host of the Lightning talks! Yesterday I was up really late to get more people to join the fun!
My schedule for the day is packed!
Sheena Yap Chan: Building Confidence to Foster Inclusive and Collaborative Tech Communities
Olivia Wasalski: On coding guidelines, class invariants, and special member functions
Tom Sellek: The 10x Team
Oleksandr Kunichik: Bridging C++ and Java with Qt JNI: An Android Application for On-Device Landmine Detection and
Sherry Sontag, Lara Bailey, Marek Paska, Michelle D’Souza, John Pavan, Cal Pratt: Building a career off-road
Ouuuuu lalaaah!!
Sheena got it going with a wonderful keynote about confidence in ourselves, our work, and our teams. We really need to get the point about how to get teams working together!
Olivia is now one of my favorite speakers among all the others! Yes, I’m sorry for all the other greats, but she is absolutely killing it! How can you explain how/what good code looks like with such deep and complex subjects with only a handful of carefully “clapmed” examples :D :D “hashtag” mindblowned, like my kids would say!
Tom has been on everyone’s lips this year, I think that he nailed the importance of teams…. but really, really focused on how a good team should look like and how we can all make our a little better :)
All I can say is:
Oleksandr showed us how we can all become useful for the world, with our talents. We can all take 2 libraries, put them together and call it a day. This is our jobs.
But who can acutally prove that they have been saving lives with their code? I bet only a few of us. I cannot thank him enough for being here, and telling us his story and how his little drop in the ocean could help save lives…
And then came the panel, out of which I think I learned more about how free time can lead to great advancement compared to how to build a carrer “off road, but I really liked the vibe of the panel and the audience, being on the edge of our seats the whole time to hear each others stories and how it lead to their current position.
Really insipiring!
After only a quick rehersal in my hotel room, I got to the venue for an evening of Lightning Talks! Hosted by… myself!!
I prepared a little recap of the previous editions, with funny moments and highlights I really liked.
I was so happy to see Mike just in front of me, absolutely enjoying his moment :)
We had a completely packed 1h45m of talks, anecdotes and inspiring quotes! I love the fact that we had 3 volunteers doing lightning talks! (Okay, maybe I influenced/pushed them into it but they were great!!)
We had so many fun and diverse set of speakers, I’m absolutely happy with the turnout. Everyone after the evening were mentionning the great quality of lightning talks! Great energy!
| Awab Qureshi | Anton Veselskyi |
|---|---|
I couldn’t sleep, so after the local restaurent kicked us out, I went for a stroll in the park. Where I made a funny comment to someone and we went then to speak for almost an hour. This homeless guy came from New-Brundswick, liked swimming but hated sharks, played piano and sang songs, and was genuinly a very good hearted person. He even shared me his intragram account. I was very happy to be able to share a moment with him, but I knew that was only temporary. I’m very saddened that I couldn’t do anything for him, other then be a good ear…
Wednesday, Day 3 :’(
I’m sad because it’s the last day on the conference…. But no time for tears! Scott Hanselman is here for the opening Keynote! I had already met him on the sunday when he arrived at the Hotel. What an honor :P It’s pretty rare that keynotes stay for the whole conference, it was amazing. I’m sure that everyone that talked to him agrees that he is really inspirational and we can feel how he cares about people.
This is a “peoples” conference, not a tech conference(surprise!) and it shows. For me, the ‘Cpp’ in CppNorth stands for Caring Passionate People. That title could also include Scott. What an amazing person, and an amazing keynoter.
Thank you!!
My highlights of the rest of the day were about Graphics Programming with SDL 3, by Mike Shah, Why are software engineers so hard to replace by Heather Crawford and John Pavan and finally Debugger Visualizers to Make Your Code Accessible by the one and only Braden Ganetsky. I learned a lot. A lot of things that I can directly go back to work and try to use. I love it when I can relate to a talk that isn’t directly related to my field, and all of them were home runs. (hehe, really!)
And then came the closing Keynote…. I don’t know what happened, hehehe (maybe?) but Alex Dathskovsky told me that I would be included into his talk, but I had no idea where or how. I found it suspicious that he asked me to send him all the pictures that I have of him first :D
hehe I have 1 more :)
He talked about how to use reinterpret_cast safely (just don’t!) and along the way introduced us to safe_cast (https://github.com/calebxyz/safe_cast) to help with corner cases and prevent errors, brilliant!
Saying goodbye to such good friends was very hard…. I had a hard time prevent tears from filling up my face because I knew that there would be a lot of time before I could see my new friends again… so….
I hope to see you all again for another great edition next year!!
Thank you, Caring Passionate People! I love all of you!!