Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 141: 🇨🇦 CppNorth Live 🇨🇦 Kate Gregory, Jessica Kerr & Kristen Shaker!

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

In this episode, Conor and Ben Deane record live from CppNorth 2023 in Toronto, Canada and interview more speakers and attendees from the conference!Link to Episode 141 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBen DeaneGuests InterviewedKate GregoryKristen ShakerJessica KerrShow NotesDate Recorded: 2023-07-19Date Released: 2023-08-04CppNorthCppNorth 2023: Keynote - Optimizing for Change - Ben DeaneCppNorth 2023: Keynote - Steps to Wisdom for C++ Developers - Kate GregoryCppNorth 2023: Iteration Revisited - Tristan BrindleC++ On Sea 2023: Iteration Revisited - Tristan BrindleNDC Tech Town 2023 Kongsberg ConferenceNYC++ MeetupCppNorth 2023: What’s New in Compiler Explorer? - Matt GodboltLightning Talk: Using Clang Query to Isolate AST Elements - Kristen Shaker - C++ on Sea 2022CppNorth 2023: Keynote - I can write the code. But getting something done is another matter - Jessica KerrHoneyComb.ioChangeLog Jessica Kerr EpisodesJessica Kerr WebsiteCppNorth 2023: Jessica Kerr Lightning TalkIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Oh, it's been lovely. This is like, it's a three-day conference and it's the third day and I'm not completely sick of it yet. And nobody else is either, which is unusual for conferences these days. I remember going to my first conference. I remember how scared I was. I didn't know how any of it worked. And the more welcoming we can be and the more we can make everything make sense to everybody, that's going to naturally give us more speakers, more organizers, more volunteers, more everything, as well as more attendees. Some human, I think it was Matt Godbolt said today. Some human. That is a great description of Matt Godbolt. Some human. My name's Kristen. I work on the C++ Libraries team at Google. We like to think of ourselves as like the stewards of the C++ portion of the code.

The very ending of my keynote was actually a callback to how Mike opened the conference on Monday. He said, patience,1, recorded on July 19th, 2023. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Ben Dean, we record live from CPP North 2023 in Toronto, Canada, and talk to speakers and attendees. Today we speak to Kate Gregory, Kristen Shaker, and Jessica Kerr. We're going to hand the mic to Ben, who's going to interview Kate Gregory, who has been on the podcast once. I think it was turned into four episodes, and you were recording from your cabin at the time, but handing the mic over to Ben, who's going to interview Kate. Hi, Kate. So you're one of the board members here at CPP North. How is that going?

Oh, so much better today. Thank you. We just announced a very large sponsor, made us very happy. We have a gold sponsor. Boy, is it ever hard work to run a conference. Last year, we didn't know how to run a conference. So we thought this year would be easier. This year was harder because we knew what we were doing was much harder. But we made a conference. I'm so happy, so happy with this program and people. Well, it certainly has been and continues to be a fantastic conference. It's been wonderful being here.

You're an experienced keynote speaker at this point. So how do you come up with a new idea for a keynote, especially at your home conference? So yeah, that was a challenge. The atmosphere here is different. The keynote that I did here last year, I couldn't have done anywhere else. I feel like here I can reach out a little different topic area. So I was struggling with what was I going to talk about? And I had one idea in my head. And my husband, bless him, he came into the room to show me a way cool thing that had just come in the mail. A little tool.

And I loved this little tool. And I thought, oh, that goes in my keynote. And I wrote my keynote. And then I actually ended up dropping the section about tools from it, which is a shame. But that was my inspiration. The idea of life as a journey and having good tools and having the things you need to get along the way. Yeah. Cool. What would you say to any people out there who haven't thought maybe about speaking, but maybe we could

convince them to take up speaking? What would you say to them about the process of coming up with ideas and making a talk and coming to a conference? Oh should first of all like no matter no matter what it takes to be able to get you to do it you should do it because it's it's life-changing yeah you don't really understand a topic until you try to explain it and i encourage people when they do a first talk to do something that really matters to them so like someone else can do what's new in c++ 26 or whatever there'll be a big lineup of people to do that. But if you were like, we decided to get right with const in our code or with const expert in our code, and here's what happened. That's a great talk. I want to hear

that talk because you care about it. Absolutely. Yeah, I would echo that you don't need to be an expert to be a speaker either. Like the valuable talk can be, here's the journey of how I discovered this, right? Absolutely. And even if it didn't work sometimes, you know? So we had a lightning talk last night that ended with, you know, to be continued. They didn't have a conclusion yet.

That's okay. That's still valuable. I'll add too that it's been amazing to see during the lightning talks. I think it was two volunteers, Emily and Jeremy, who hopefully we can find at some point today to chat with them. I could be wrong. I mean, they seem like they were experienced speakers, but I've never seen them give talks at C++ conferences. I think the lightning talk you were just referring to was Diana's first talk. And I was poking her like, are you going to give a 60 minute follow up next year? And we talked to Vincent Zalzal. So it seems like there's...

Vincent's first talk. Yeah. Vincent's first conference and first talk is right here at CPP North. And that talk, I'm in the back going, I would give this talk. So the talk I would give them, that's better. I would not have done that part. And that's fantastic. Hey, he's doing my talk that I didn't write better than I would have written it. Like it was very good. And then someone said, this is his first talk. Oh, that's impressive. Yeah. And there's, I won't name names of other conferences, but definitely there are certain conferences where their sort of mission statement is we want to give the best experience, which means they're less interested in trying to find new voices

and take risks on new speakers. And I know that one of our missions, I'm no longer involved in organizing, but I was last year, was trying to take risks on new speakers because we see a lot of the times at other conferences, like I think there was something on Twitter where there was a shot of the front row and it was like 90% the same front row as it was at C++ on C last week, which is great because a lot of people love listening to speakers that they know. But I love like finding new speakers like, you know, when you see someone new and you have no idea, are they going to be like super confident? And those lightning talks were like, I was like, these volunteers need to be like, you know know giving full 60 minute talks next year because

like especially like they seemed a bit younger i'm assuming i know emily mentioned i believe she was in third year university and still has a couple like at that level if they're already that good like imagine the kind of talks they're going to be giving in you know five years if they continue at it so i was just like super awesome to see like new voices and uh people that you know first time conferences just fantastic because I know that was a mission of this conference. So it seems like, you know, this is the second year and we're already starting to see that pay dividends. We really are. And, you know, I have a talk I haven't been able to find home for partly because whenever I do it, it's three hours long. So I have

to make it shorter before I can find that a home, but it's about how to have a more diverse set of speakers. There's 11 main bullets. 10 of them are about having more diverse attendees. Because that's where we're going to grow your speakers from. So you be welcoming. You be a place that people feel okay to come. I remember going to my first conference. I remember how scared I was. I didn't know how any of it worked.

I literally didn't even really understand how convention centers and hotels worked, you know. And the more welcoming we can be and the more we can make everything make sense to everybody, that's going to naturally give us more speakers, more organizers, more volunteers, more everything, as well as more attendees. Yeah. And I would say to folks out there, if there's a talk that you want to watch on youtube the best way to affect that is to give that talk that's how i started one of the things i love about conferences is you know how the talks evolve during the conference from having seen other talks like your talk your keynote kate was fantastic and you gave me the phrase, you know,

this should work. I saw that for the first time. It might have been the first CPPCon where Chandler and Andre were alternating. They gave multiple talks and they were quoting each other back and forth. I've never been an edit my slide on the day person, but I'm thrilled when people do it. I love seeing a callback to something we just experienced yeah it's great yeah i'll mention too like we were talking to tristan who we interviewed yesterday and he gave us the same version of a talk that he's giving in t minus something came up on my watch nine minutes from now and he gave it like a couple weeks ago or three weeks ago at c++ on C. But that was the first time he was giving that talk there. And so obviously there's no other talks mentioning it or the library because it hasn't really been announced. I think technically

he talked about it on a podcast. But now at this conference, I think there's been three talks already that have like referred to the library that he's, you know, talking about. So it's, if you are an avid talk watcher, it's very cool to see like, you know, one talk influencing other talks and the keynotes are basically all referring back to like the previous keynotes. And anyways, it's, it's super cool. You know, you have to watch them all and it's a little bit easier. I think if you're at the conference, cause you're seeing stuff chronologically happen. But if you're watching this on YouTube later, you might be able to pick up on, I mean, my favorite was when I saw Stefan Labowate.

He's a big fan of Ramanujan numbers, as I am. And I think actually in your slide, you also had 42 and 1729. 1729 is one of my standard example numbers, yeah. Yeah, and so like I think in one of my talks once, I was like, oh, like I didn't know Stefan was like a huge fan. Anyways, it's just like for the, I don't know if it's super nerds or whatever, math nerds that just like numbers. It's very cool.

It's kind of like Easter eggs. If you watch enough talks, you start to pick up on things. Yeah, I definitely. Do you put things like that in your talks, Kate? I definitely put unexplained. You know, I don't bother to explain it while I'm talking, but there are examples for people who know. I do. 42 is usually there.

Absolutely. If you have to have a number. And there are certain things I don't put in. I used to do foo and bar, and now I don't. I have like a half hour on that. It's not the swearing. It's the darkness. It's a very dark humor.

But I think people say, wow, the same speakers are at the same conferences all the time, and we are. But it also then that calls back to where did we get our ideas from? I got my idea from watching someone else's talk, and it connected one thing to another thing in my brain and I went, oh, and then I got an idea. Cool. So what's going on for you for the rest of this year? I'm going to do nothing for August, like no thing. There's a hammock.

I have some very thick books, fiction. Then in September, October, November, I have some private conferences, but I will also be in Norway for NDC Tech Town, where probably five of the speakers will have been here too, but all the rest of the attendees will be different. And that's what I like about going to Europe, is I get to see a different set of attendees. Great. Awesome.

We will say thank you for being interviewed, and we will make sure that i think as your keynote as well as ben i think the keynotes typically come out uh first so by the time this airs because this might be part two of the cpp north live 2023 and we haven't mentioned we're on day three now so this is everything up till now you've heard was day two we're now the final morning we just finished watching jessica's keynote which was fantastic We hope to find her later and have a chat with her. But, yeah, thank you so much. And thank you for, you know, you're on the organizing committee of the board.

Thank you for putting on such an awesome conference. I'm so happy that we got Bloomberg as a last-minute gold sponsor because I, you know, have back channels to be able to hear updates. And it was, you know, it wasn't certain that there was going to be a third installation of this conference and mike was able to just announce that uh we're definitely going to be back you know details to be announced but there will be a cpp north 2024 anyway so thank you for all the hard work that you've done behind the scenes this conference has been awesome thank you for being here thank you for being part of it all right i'm going to hand the mic over to ben and we are going to interview kristin all right yeah, we are here at CPP North with Kristen Shaker. Kristen, how's the conference?

The conference is great. Tell us a bit about your C++ every day and your C++ journey. Okay, so my name's Kristen. I work on the C++ Libraries team at Google. We like to think of ourselves as, like, the stewards of the C++ portion of team at Google. We like to think of ourselves as the stewards of the C++ portion of the codebase, and in that aim, we strive to make it as

maintainable, as usable, as reliable, as readable as possible. So I end up doing a lot of large-scale refactorings, trying to keep the codebase kind of pristine, optimized, and nice to use, and all that kind of stuff. I started writing C++ in college when I was 18.

They made all of the engineers take an intro to programming class, and I just loved it so much that I switched my major. And the whole curriculum of the University of Michigan is in C++. So I actually had a really solid foundation, and I thought I knew the language really well, and then I joined the C++ Libraries team at Google, and I realized I knew nothing. And I'm reminded of that fact every day.

I know slightly more than nothing now. I think that's a common experience. No matter how experienced you are at C++, you're often reminded that you don't know the things you don't know, a lot of things you don't know. Now, you're in the New York area, correct? Yes, I am. And you have a role in the New York C++ Meetup, so tell us about that. Yeah, so we're just like a group of individuals who are excited about C++

and love getting together to talk about it. We meet roughly once a month and we have some really world-renowned speakers come. We've had Titus Winters, David Sankal. We've had speakers from Facebook and Adobe. We've had events at MongoDB. And we've had Google speakers. So it's a really cool event.

You come, you mingle, you meet people in the industry, you make connections, and you really just have a good time. So if you are in the New York area, I would highly suggest you come to one of our meetups. You can find us. We are on meetup.com. NYC++ is the name of our organization. And yeah, we'd love to see you there.

So it's a monthly schedule? Is it a set? Like in Denver, we meet the first Thursday of the month. Do you have a set? No, it varies on hosting availability, I think, most of the time. Also, we like to accommodate speakers for when they're traveling into the city. So for example, we had Inbal Levy, who is based in Tel Aviv, come and we scheduled our meetup around her time in the city. So it's more variable, but the cadence is roughly once a month. Cool. So what talks have you enjoyed here at the conference? So I just got out of Matt Godbolt's

What's New in Compiler Explorer talk. I love learning about Compiler Explorer because it's 85% of my job. I do a ton of static analysis work for Google to execute these large-scale refactorings. We have to isolate very specific nodes in the abstract syntax tree. So I do a lot of work looking at clang output, and Compiler Explorer is a great tool for that. You can visualize the AST. You can visualize the control flow graph. You can test matchers in real time and see if you are correctly identifying and

isolating the nodes that you're looking for. So I love learning about Compiler Explorer. So I really enjoyed that talk. Awesome. Wait, wait. I also really enjoyed Connor's talk about combinators. It was a great talk. It was very entertaining. Yeah. And I learned a lot. Will you be going back to Google and turning everything into combinators? No. Turning some things into combinators? Thinking about combinators when you design and write code. Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a win. That's a win, folks. I use combinators a lot when I write Python for personal projects. There you go. But I don't use it a lot at work, to be honest. But I use the Python combinators a lot. At least I think they're combinators a lot when I write Python for personal projects. There you go. But I don't use it a lot at work, to be honest. But I use the Python combinators a lot. At least I think they're combinators. Like, you know, the map and filter and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, there is a slide in my talk that talks about the Venn diagram of stuff. And in the larger sense, that maps and filters are combinators. They are functions that deal only in their arguments. Yeah. Is this your first time at this conference? Yes. Is it your first time in Canada? Or maybe you've probably been to Canada before,

being in New York. I almost went to McGill. So not my first time in Canada. I was here once when I was 18. Okay. But I don't know. I don't like to count anything that happened more than six years ago

because when I tend to think about that time, I just cringe a little bit. So I really only exist post-age 22, so I have not yet been to Canada in that time period. Sure, yeah. I mean, you'll reach a point in your life when you can look on that fondly, but it's true that you can look back at yourself, anyone can look back at themselves, and think how little they knew when they were at that age. I remember, anecdotally, I was in an interview once, and I was a huge fan of Excel, and they asked me,

so on a scale of 1 to 10, where are you? And I said, well, you know, I don't want to say there's no room for growth. But, you know, so I said, you know, I kind of want to say 9, but also kind of 10. I didn't even know what a pivot table was at the time, folks. I retrospectively should have been a 0. I knew how to make graphs, and that was it. But you don't know what a pivot table was at the time, folks. I retrospectively should have been a zero. I knew how to make graphs and that was it. But you don't know what you don't know. It's a hallmark of expertise that you're acutely aware of how much you don't know, I think.

I got this quote from Ben. The larger your island of knowledge, the longer your shore of ignorance. We love that from Ben. I didn't make that up. I can't remember where I got that from, but someone said that first and it was not me. It wasn't in the C++ community. It was just someone I found online. So here's a question. I believe Titus, when I was chatting with him last year about the 2022 version of this conference, he mentioned your name as a

potential speaker. You didn't speak then. I don't think you're speaking this year. Can we expect to see Kristen Shaker giving a talk at CPP North 2024 as Mike just mentioned this morning because of Bloomberg being a gold sponsor, we're going to have an audition can we expect to see you on stage there, putting you on the spot a little bit I mean you run a meetup

or at least you co-run a meetup so I assume you are a speaker there at times it depends on whether or not CppCon accepts my abstract and I am forced to actually write the talk. Great. Well, you know, if it's a good abstract, I'm sure they will. Once it's written, I have no qualms about giving it at subsequent conferences.

I don't actually know which talk you submit to CppCon. Normally I'm on the program committee, but this year they, I got the email and then it stayed in my inbox for a while. And then when I finally got around to it, to signing up, then I got an email from Chris saying, you know, we're just wrapping up. And I look back at the date and it had been like five weeks since, so I was a bit late on that one. Can we get a preview of this potentially going to be accepted because i i tell you what would this be your first talk at like a c++ conference i gave a lightning talk on how to uh leverage compiler explorer to i like look at the ast and isolate specific lines of code and this talk would be about how to write your first clank tidy that i would like to see that talk because Clang Tidy is one of those things,

like it's been on my list of things to get around. It'd be super useful just to have an on-ramp into writing your own Clang Tidy check. Yeah, so the idea would be how to, like it would be an overview of what the AST is. It's like super information-rich data structure that we have as part of the compilation process, how you can leverage creation of that tree to isolate and alter pieces of your code to be

more idiomatic or more performant, and how you can run that tooling over translation units and actually generate the edits in real time. I'm a big user of Clang Tidy because it's part of the CI process, right? It's really important for quality. But I feel like if there were a lower barrier to entry to actually every company writing their own Clang Tidy checks, like the individual little things that you want your code base to look like, that would be great. Yeah, the AST matches are notoriously opaque

and there's limited documentation on it. So it'd be really nice to just have like an end-to-end user story. Here is how you start from scratch. Here is how you actually get to the point where you can run it on real code. Just like a video explaining that. That was kind of the idea, the impetus for the talk. So we'll see if it gets accepted.

Cool. Well, if it doesn't get accepted in one conference, I hope to see it at another future conference. Yeah. Okay. And I will put this talk whenever it shows up at a conference and whenever it shows up on YouTube. It'll be in the show notes. It might be, you know, three months from now.

But I've got a little Python script that checks my unlinked links so that they're never, you know, sometimes it takes a while. But for the listeners, if you just started listening in 2025, guaranteed there's a link to this from a YouTube recording from some conference that happened in the past. Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Kristen. You're welcome. Awesome. conference that happened in the past. Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Kristen. You're welcome. Awesome. Enjoy the rest of the conference. And we hope to see you here next year. Yeah. And let's go to lunch.

We'll figure something out. All right. We're here. Almost the end of day three, 2023 CPP North. We're about to interview the third keynote that took place this morning. I'm going to hand the mic over to Ben and let him do the interview. Hi, this is Jessica Kerr, and she's here at CPP North. Jessica, how's the conference been for you? Oh, it's been lovely. This is like, it's a three-day conference, and it's the third day,

and I'm not completely sick of it yet. And nobody else is either, which is unusual for conferences these days so you're better known outside of c++ than in the c++ community so just tell us a bit about what you do and how it is you you happen to be at the c++ conference um right what do i do i talk about software to software engineers i'm actually really into systems thinking and how our software is a complex system that we're part of. And you work at Honeycomb. I do. I work at Honeycomb. And the reason I work at Honeycomb is Honeycomb is an observability tool. And observability gives us, as developers, a tool for seeing into the systems that we create, not just the code,

but the actual running systems in production. And that's kind of an amazing way for us to get better at working with systems. So my thing is that as software developers, we have a unique opportunity to play in these complex distributed systems that we also have some control over and we have the ability to make them tell us what's going on. So I think we are uniquely positioned to get good at working in complex systems. And that's something the world needs right now, inside and outside of software. Absolutely. So how did you come to be speaking at a C++ conference?

Oh, Eamon emailed me and asked me if I wanted to. Well, great. I may secretly, I'm the former program chair and Jessica may secretly be one of my favorite speakers of all time. I've seen many of your talks.

I've also, we'll link in the show notes. I'll figure out how to do it because you've been, I think you actually have a couple of podcasts yourself now we were chatting earlier, but you've been a long time guest on many, very, very much more popular than our podcasts. I think you were on changelog and they have, I don't know how many thousands of listeners, but, uh, I can't keep, I can't keep track. I just always say yes, because, um, I never really know what I think until somebody asks me so i find out

tell us more i mean we were both in the keynote this morning i absolutely fantastic i'm you know and also your lightning talk last night like it was just i was i was watching the lightning talk and i was like this is gonna take a turn i was like did it did he steal all his ideas and then the turn was just anyways we'll link the lightning talk it was so amazing and i was like holy smokes like you bring like a whole other like style and just, anyways, we'll link the lightning talk. It was so amazing. And I was like, holy smokes, like you bring like a whole other like style and just energy. Anyways, lightning talk was amazing. But tell us a bit about your keynote.

It was absolutely fantastic. But yeah. Thanks about the lightning talk. I worked hard on that one over the last couple of weeks. But my keynote this morning was about the difference between writing code

and getting anything done. Like really making changes in a software system, which is part of a larger system and how much more work that is and how much more social work that is. Because we think of software change as a technical problem,

but in any company bigger than one engineering team, it's mostly a social problem. Yeah, it was a great keynote and um i felt very complimentary to to mine which is great whenever you come to a conference and other talks can play off yours you know i talked about technical the technical problems are changing you talked about the social problems so i'd like to ask you you know as one speaker to another what's your process for making a talk? Okay, so anymore, at some point, the organizers really want a title or abstract.

And then I tell them what I want to have talked about at this moment, what I want to talk about right then. And then... I like the way you put it, what I want to have talked about. Like, it's good to have done the talk. Exactly.

I'm very happy right now, yeah. But this was a new keynote. But I found that I was really excited about talking about the difference between coding and getting things done. And then last week, I had to sit down and actually start writing the top. But I didn't want to because I wanted to work on this blog post about what the engineering team at Honeycomb has been doing with this big re-architecting project that they've been working on. And then I realized that I could use that as an example in this keynote. Nice. That is very fortuitous that the stars aligned. The thing that you wanted to work on, you discovered,

is the thing I can work on in preparation for this keynote. Exactly, exactly. I brought the pipes together in that way. And that made it easier to work on the keynote. But still, it takes a crunch takes a crunch a deadline to actually bring these creative things together so fortunately i i spoke on the last day of the conference so i had the first two days to write it right oh okay so you are one of these people who goes up to the wire i mean i i try to get my slides done a couple of weeks ahead of time and then iterate them.

But I still go up to the wire with changes. I mean, I saw what I think was a photo of the aforementioned Eamon, who is now the program chair, in your talk. And I'm pretty sure that that wasn't a photo from taken in the past. It looks like you took that photo at this conference. Yeah, like today. Oh, no, no, no. Like about 10 minutes before the keynote started, I found Eamon. So that photo was actually taken from the podium where my laptop was already set up

and went into the presentation. That is, because I saw that he had the beard, and this is the first time. We're giving a lot of description to Eamon here. Our program chair, we love you, Eamon. Thanks for the work you did. He has a yellow shirt today. He has a yellow shirt today. He had a yellow shirt today. But it was the beard I was like, I'm pretty sure this was taken at the conference.

And so you were editing your keynote, like, not just at the conference, but minutes before you're giving it. That is, you know, this is like Tony's talks. Tony had a talk a few years ago where one of his slides was a picture of him on the stage showing the slide. And then it like recursed. So it was this picture of him showing the slide with the picture of him in the slide. Wow. Wow. I'm still not sure how he pulled that off.

This is what separates, you know, the aspiring speakers to the keynote speakers is being able to, you able to edit that late and still pull off what looks like it. And I'm like, wait, this is so polished. What separates those aspiring speakers from those keynote speakers is time. It's that I've done this a bunch, and so it's not scary. And I know that in two days I can pull it together because I've been working on it in my head for weeks. Right, right. So I have the same thing. Yeah, I've been thinking about it forever.

And then it's time to just like make it concrete. Condense it. Yeah. And then so I made an adequate version of the slides, talked through the talk, stopped and was like, nope, these are in the wrong order. Nope, I need this right here. And I don't know how it's going to go until I vocalize it. Right. Yeah, so talk through it, get the slide deck enough for that.

And then if I have time, go through it again. I was able to go through the conclusion twice. The conclusion is the hard bit. So you, sort of maybe as a last question, because we've got only a few minutes before the final keynote that is going to wrap this conference.

You have, as Mike mentioned, as he introduced you, spoken, keynoted at many different conferences in many different communities. And this is your first time to a C++ conference, and definitely this conference isn't necessarily representative of all different C++ conferences. But my two kind of questions are, what are your overall honest thoughts of the community here?

But also, is there anything that you've seen in other communities that you think we could borrow from that would be good to incorporate to make this conference be more inclusive? Definitely, I think we're doing our best, but if you look around in the audience, we definitely could do better in terms of attracting different folks to this conference. So you've been to so many different communities and seen different flavors and whatnot. Just, yeah, interested to get your thoughts of maybe what we're doing, how you feel about the conference, when, and what we could do in the future. I think the conference is fantastic.

I think one reason it's day three and I'm not exhausted, I haven't seen any alcohol at this conference. I have a non-alcoholic beer in my hand right now. I love those. Years of practice getting relaxed by beer. This stuff totally works. It's super family friendly. There like parent rooms there's a prayer room the bathrooms have been converted into all gender bathrooms which still makes them mostly men's bathrooms because

it that's the the ratio but there are many uh really interesting women here and several of the speakers. So I suspect the diversity level is probably better than the C++ community as a whole. I think that's true, yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is a group of people who, there's a ton of people with PhDs. They are really smart. And they can solve really hard problems, such as writing code in C++ that doesn't have undefined behavior. Well, I mean, come on now.

That's a bit of a tall order. Yes, totally. And the talks are, like, super technical, but also well-researched and interesting. And I've learned a bunch about the language, which is really fun. But it's fun to see a bunch of people who are excited to learn more about a language and also care about people. We want to do this better. And it's not about I want to be the best. It's really about everyone is here to help other people as well as themselves which feels great there's a lot that i'll take away this to

this conference and from this conference and recommend in other communities great yes and i totally agree you know when i get up on stage and give a talk i try to give talks that have nuggets of information, actionable things. I don't want people to come away from the talk thinking, well, you know, that was Ben and he does that stuff, but I could never. I want people to think, there's some things I could use, right? I can get there too. Yeah, and your talk was about having the unreasonable goal of perfection, of no bugs when the software leaves your laptop.

Right. And that is a useful goal to aim for. Don't expect it of yourself. Totally, yeah. I mean, I've made many mistakes, right? I still do. Some human, I think it was Matt Godbolt said today. Some human.

That is a great description of Matt Godbolt. Some human. I think it was Matt Godbolt said today. Some human. That is a great description of Matt Godbolt. Some human. Some human. I think it was Matt Gobbled. Just to clarify that he wasn't a computer or something. He said, no human can write correct Siebel's Plus code. Was it correct? Something about no human can write Siebel's Plus code without undefined behavior.

Meaning, use your linters. Right. Use your Clang Tidy and your Sonar and your other tools. Yeah. It's a socio-technical system, and we aren't in it alone. Exactly. Awesome. Well, I'll finish by saying thank you so much for coming and speaking.

I can't wait for your talk to go online for not just the folks here that saw it, but the Internet to see it, because I think the talk is great in general. But the way you ended it just sort of on that. Don't just think about the code. Think about the impact. And also, like, I'm saying this, but if you feel this way about your job, like, that's totally valid and totally legitimate. And there's different ways to have, you know, impact. Sometimes it's through your job, your code. But anyways, the note you ended on was just so fantastic.

And one of my favorite talks of yours. There we go. We'll edit that in post. But yeah, thank you so much for coming. And hopefully we'll run into each other maybe at this conference in the future at another conference. It was so awesome to have you at this conference. I tell you that the very ending of my keynote was actually a callback to how Mike opened the conference on Monday. He said, uh, patience, curiosity, and love. That's what we need. And, and I was really pleased to get to call back to that. Yeah. It was so awesome. Yep. Yeah. I did notice that. So anyway, thanks very much. Thank you. Enjoy the last talk. Hopefully, hopefully that's not the one that puts you over the edge. Uh, but yeah, thanks so much. Thank you to all of the speakers and attendees that agreed

to be interviewed over the last two episodes. These episodes were a blast to record and edit. Be sure to check your show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSPthepodcast.com for links to anything

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