Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 33: New York, New York!

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

In this episode, Conor and Bryce talk about Bryce’s upcoming move to New York and the 2022 ISO C++ meetings.Date Recorded: 2021-06-26Date Released: 2021-07-09Lassen Volcanic National ParkISO C++ MeetingsISO C++ GithubRust on GithubIntro 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

The look on your face just says like, okay, so for the audience, I'm a few minutes late and I just joined the call and I was expecting, I was expecting Connor to be doing something else, but no, he's just sitting there staring at the camera as if he's just been sitting there still doing nothing else for the past, for the past half an hour. I'm sorry, buddy. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast episode 33 recorded on June 26, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we have a casual chat about Bryce's impending move to New York City

and also the upcoming 2022 ISO C++ committee meetings. So, yeah, I'm sorry I was late. I do this thing now where I eat breakfast after my morning bikes bike ride so uh and um uh I I did a very intensive bike ride yesterday um broke a new personal record whoo um but then this morning I got out to bike ride and I was just like oh my god I'm I'm old nothing works this is gonna take forever what was the personal record you broke? Distance? Speed? Yeah, just like average speed. Nice.

So I did, yesterday I did 20 kilometers at an average speed of 30 kilometers an hour. And I usually do around that distance at an average speed of 28 kilometers an hour. So, you know, you're, you're when you're like, like training, you're supposed to either increase your velocity or your distance. So I had been working on increasing distance for a while and now I've been working on upping my velocity. But anyways, so I got back a little bit, a little bit later than expected. And then I had to shower and I had to have my breakfast cheese. And I was like, I could come 10 minutes earlier to the podcast and just eat my breakfast cheese during the podcast, but it's a podcast. So me eating cheese and crackers probably isn't going to come over that well just and to be clear a few minutes

by a few minutes what bryce means is 33 minutes it was 30 minutes it was it was 33 it was 33 i'm sorry it's all it's all right i mean i was 50 minutes late for the last one and we had guests that time so um when are you moving i was half expecting you to be in new york uh because you took no i move august 25th and uh um i'm flying out next week actually like like eight days i fly out to new york to go find a place yeah is it eight no maybe it's like two weeks no i guess it's basically like next week i fly out on the 7th there's a lot of big c++ names moving between uh companies you know about one of we can't say it yet but you know about one of them that's happening it's coming in video somebody coming to nvidia yeah i'm very excited about yes as am i

drama do i leave this do i leave this in the podcast uh i because i oh yeah i definitely do anyways how things been man this so yeah our for our listeners, it's been, what, May 12th was, I think, the last time we actually had an episode where it was just me. Was it? Yeah, it's been like a month and a half because. Oh, but we've talked since then, yeah. It's just that we haven't had an episode of just me and you since then. Have we talked since then? I'm not even sure yeah because we recorded the we recorded the one with patricia and the the patricia and uh

and yeah but chandler i don't i don't count the i don't count those though because it's different whenever we because we we did sean yeah but i'm just saying it's like it's like it's not like we have not had a conversation right right right we we do technically have a weekly one hour one-on-one on our on my calendar but um between my move and uh just stuff at work it's just been so hectic the past few few weeks um yeah yeah no in and I mean, I'm doing good. It's just like, I'm just starting to get into moving mode. And in the past, when I've moved, I think I've, I've always like left a lot of the things to the last minute, or I've been super time constrained. And so as a result of that, I'm like over planning this move. Like, like, as an example, I, my mom's gonna be flying out for for two weeks or so in August, help me pack. And for listeners who don't know, so I was an only child raised by a single parent until my mom remarried when I think I was 14. So we have a we have sort of like a Gilmore Girls-esque connection. I'm just going to leave that reference there for anybody who can appreciate it.

But so like I told her, hey, can you come out and help me pack? Because I know it's going to be like emotional and stressful for me. And so she's coming out for two weeks in August. And I'm starting to realize, I think that there might not be anything for her to do by then. Because I've overplanned this move so much. Like I'm going to be starting to pack next week and i'm like like my strategy is i'm going to do like a box a day uh and you know then i'm going to be in new york for two weeks so i won't do any packing

then but i think there's a pretty good chance that she's going to show up here and then i'm going to mostly be done because my my strategy has been i'm just going to do it a little part like little pieces at a time right instead of like doing all of it in like, you know, two weeks where I just like take off work, I'm just like doing it in little chunks of the time. Like I've already gone and gotten rid of most of the stuff that I'm not taking. But it's just, you know, a move just, a move like this just consumes a lot of time. And then there's like a whole list of like California stuff that I feel like I got to do before I leave California. Like what? What are we doing?

Well, Christabella and I went to Lawson National Park last weekend. It was actually like funny timing so my my dad is uh is really outdoorsy and he got me a national parks pass last year for uh for like uh hanukkah um i think maybe it was number no i think it was hanukkah um and so i booked a bunch of uh trips to national parks over the summer um twice two to yosemite two trips to yosemite and then one to lawson and at the time i didn't know i was moving to new york and I didn't know that I was going to be selling my car which is my first car and like my my love and joy um uh and uh so I'm really glad that that like it was just really fateful that he'd gotten me that pass and then I'd booked those trips in January because like

it's impossible to book reservations for anything now um if I if I'd only like done it now I wouldn't have been able to and like Yosemite you can't even get in to the park without like a reservation so so yes there's a bunch of that stuff and then um you know just been just been crazy with work but uh but yeah it's uh it's starting to get like real. Cause like I'm going out to New York in like a week to go look for places. So like my, uh, my time, like I sort of started feeling like six weeks ago, like, oh crap, like the move is here. Like my time in California is done and now it's all going to go very quickly. Like from this point forward until when I'm in New York, like it's just going to be a whirlwind and sort of like, like, yeah, like that I, I, I have not moved out of California yet,

but I'm, I've reached the stage where stuff is going to happen quickly enough that and all this, you know, it'll all be changed that, that I've already effectively left that, you know, cause like when you're in the state where you're like packing up your apartment like you still don't live in that state you're sort of in a transitionary period um and so really like you know like May was my last real month uh in California uh I mean to some degree this this month but I was already

sort of in moving mode. Yeah. Are you excited? Yeah, I am excited. Yeah, I think it'll be really fun. I'm really looking forward to being closer to my grandparents. And, you know, I have a whole collection of friends that lives out here in Silicon Valley. A bunch of them are moving to other places too. But one of the nice things about the tech community that we're in is that it's sort of like a global community.

So, you know, anywhere that I move, any major city that I move to, I just, I instantly know that there's going to be some number of people that I'm friendly with that happen to live in that city. Like, you know, it's, I don't know, I don't know how far the train is from Toronto to New York, but like, I think it's like, you know, a couple hours at most. What? Definitely. It's like four hours from Toronto to Montreal.

Oh, okay. The train is like, I don't know, if we're, there's a Billy Bishop airport that's on Toronto Island, and it's like a 50-minute flight, and it's like $150, which, yes, very privileged. But if I'm going to New York, it's via plane. It's not a train. Okay, all right.

But at least we'll be in the same time zone. And then there's a bunch of C++ people in New York that I'll be able to chill with. So, yeah, it's just this nice thing that like you know i there's a bunch of c++ people in new york um that i'll be able to chill with and so yeah it's just like it's just this nice thing that like you know the a pretty much anywhere i go in the world you know there's always going to be people that i know isn't like uh one of the plans first couple iso meetings going to be in new york yeah the um the next summer meeting um you know assuming that we have face-to-face meetings. So right now the plan is that the 2022 winter meeting, so the 2022 meeting that would be in February, is planned to be in Portland. And that's not actually a rescheduled meeting. That was like a meeting we planned pre pandemic. And it's actually a joint or two co-located meetings. The C committee is supposed to meet a week before that. So that meeting is the first one that we think might happen.

And then the New York meeting would be in, I think, June 2022 um so right now the plan is like we're assuming that those are going to happen but you know we really don't know yeah um to tell uh it's too early to tell but i i i think it's you know it's looking good right now the thing that i worry about now is not um not whether we can hold the meeting it's whether we can hold the meeting equitably yeah um you know if if you hold if you obviously it's going to be a hybrid event you know no matter how we do it it's going to be a hybrid event uh prior to the pandemic the um committee, the C++ committee meetings largely didn't allow for remote attendance. And that didn't mean that we forbid remote attendance. You weren't allowed to vote in plenary motions if you were attending remotely. But honestly, voting on plenary motions

is not really what participating in the committee meeting is. I always say to people, your voice is much louder than your vote. Your vote is almost not, it's not something to lose sleep over. And this is like, I tell this in particular to there are some folks who, for a variety of reasons, don't have voting rights in the committee. And, you know, I have to tell them that's not

really, you know, super, super relevant. Your votes in subgroups, what we call straw polls, those are a little bit more important. But again, even there, your voice is just far more important than your vote. So you're not allowed to formally vote in the plenary motions if you attended remotely pre-pandemic. And we didn't really have any infrastructure in place for allowing remote attendance. There were some people that had attended remotely for some discussions in some special circumstances. For example, Chris Kolhoff, who lives in Australia and for whom it is difficult to travel to a committee meeting,

not just because of the time zones, but also because of work. He's not always been able to, you know, take the time off of work to go and travel to a committee meeting for a week. And I could be wrong, but I believe that he's an independent contractor. So he would not only be taking a week off work, but he'd be paying for it himself. And so you can understand why he might not be excited about the idea of paying a bunch of money to fly for a week to some location that's very far away from home when there's only, you know, one day of things maybe that would be of interest to him. So I recall him calling into, you know, some meeting in 2017 or 2018. And I recall that happening like a couple times,

but it was always like one or two people, like a special case. Definitely the pandemic has changed that. And I think definitely post pandemic, the committee meetings will be hybrid. And I don't think that that's just going to be a temporary thing. I suspect that that will be a long-term thing that you'll be able to attend remotely. I don't know about voting, but again, well, okay, do we have the teleconferencing equipment to make this happen? Do we have the webcams to make this happen? Do we have a way for them to feel like they're in the room, to raise their hand, et cetera? I recall in one particular case where somebody was listening remotely, but they didn't have a way to speak to the room. And the way that they voiced their input was they would send a message on IRC to Jonathan Wakely, and then Jonathan it didn't express what they were trying to get across very well. So I imagine that we'll do better on the infrastructure there, you know, that we'll probably make sure that we have a teleconferencing solution at whatever venues we're at. But I still think that there's a problem

of equal access, especially, you know, if it's possible for us to meet in the U.S., but it's not really possible for a bunch of people from outside the U.S. to attend. You know, the C++ committee is supposed to be this international effort. And so if the Portland meeting and the New York meeting are going to be held in the, so the US obviously already has an outsized influence on C++ because, you know, the majority of committee members are located in the U S. Um, it's probably true that the majority of committee members are American citizens. Um, uh, the U S tends to have an over, um, uh, uh, to be very overrepresented in tech standards. Would you say it's a majority? It's definitely a plurality. Um, is it, do you think it's more than 50% yes i i'm almost certain that it is i guess the meetings that i've been to were all in europe so maybe that yeah that influences that i saw more europeans because they were held in europe but probably

the ones in the u.s or less so the way to do them the way to do the math on this is quite simple. I don't even have to log into the Insights website and check how many members are on the roster to to a particular working group. And the U.S. is so far over that limit that a few years ago, the U.S. national body for the C++ committee got together and agreed that they would only register one person from each U.S. company as an official representative because that was the only way to fit within that 100-person limit. So the U.S. delegation is definitely well over 100 members. And even at our largest committee meeting, we only had, you know, 250 or so attendees. I'm fairly certain that the U.S. is definitely a majority of committee, or that the majority of committee members are U.S. citizens. But anyways, so let's say that we have this Portland meeting and that, like, let's just assume that pretty much only the U.S. based folks are able to attend that meeting. And of course, there are some people who are member who are not U.S. citizens or who have dual citizenship, but live in the U.S.

And so they represent other countries or other regions on the committee. And so maybe they could attend, but still, basically, you'd have a situation where all the U.S. folks would be at the face-to-face meeting and all the non-U.S. folks would have to attend that meeting remotely via telecom. And because the meeting's a hybrid meeting, you don't really have the luxury of picking time zones that are, you know, friendly to the rest of the world. ISO's general guidance for meetings now is to pick a rotating time slots. So they identified three time slots that are good for different regions of the world. And their advice is basically for each meeting or, you know, each day of your meeting, pick one of these time slots. And, you know, for any one person, some of these slots are going to suck. But the idea is that by rotating through the slots, you know, some people, there will be some slots that are good for some people um but i can just imagine that

that it'll be problematic to ensure that um uh that we really that we can hold these hybrid meetings in a way that um is fair for all the participants regardless of what country they're living in yeah i guess time will tell to see how it unfolds. One, if it even happens and two, how it's executed. And I am proud of the ways in which the C++ committee has been able to evolve during the pandemic. I think many people who know me know that I believe, I'm very much a logistics and process guy and so I very much believe that the C++ committee needs to modernize

how we evolve C++ a lot of our infrastructure is somewhat outdated our model is somewhat outdated it should be more open it should look more like how newer standards, some of the web standards are developed. And we've taken great strides during the pandemic to modernizing our process. We've done all of our evolution for the past year on telecons and on mailing list reviews. And we do a lot more of our evolution

on github um but i still don't think we've we've really come far enough i still don't think that our evolution process really um mirrors what the best practice is you You know, we, there's a big gap between how C++ is evolved and how a language like Rust is evolved, where, you know, pretty much all the Rust evolution happens, you know, online on their forums. And the thing that saddens me a little bit is that we're still a long way away from where I think we need to be. And even this, even these sort of strides that we've made

in the last year, they've made it clear that it's going to take a longer time to change the culture than we might like, because the participation level just has not been the same in the past year. And we just, we have not had the same bandwidth, even with doing these telecons, and even with doing reviews on things like, you know, over email, we're just not getting the same bandwidth and engagement. So as much as I hate to admit it, we really need these face to face committee meetings next year to be able to really finish C++23. And the reason that we need them is because as much as I hate to admit it, we're just not getting enough work done through the purely virtual process. And I mean, I think we're getting better at the virtual process. And I think a lot of the innovations that we've made will continue

but there's there's still a long way to go and i think the problem is not actually in the technical details or the process itself i think it's in the culture and it's really hard to change culture yeah that's for sure so what about you how have you been i'm good i booked my haircut while waiting for you to show up uh on the first day it's possible to get a haircut because we both do need haircuts i'm not cutting my hair which is now pretty long and curly until at least until i moved to new york and i might keep it for a while there yeah you're yours looks good. I like the look on you. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, I now pretty much always have to have it with a headband up and a hair scrunchie in. I have a newfound appreciation for people with long hair. But my mom's hairstylist has curly hair, too. And so she prescribed a whole regime for me and so my bathroom i have like 300 of like five different hair products that i put in my hair to is it is it regime or is it regimen i feel like regime is like a regimen i think yeah yeah regime is like a political uh i think you're right yeah you know i'm bad at words but but you know i have i have really thick curly hair and for many years for many years and i i blame

i blame my mother for this for many years um uh i was taught and trained to fight the curliness of my hair you know to try to keep it short, try to make it, you know, nice and straight, get it in a comb over. And it's only been as an adult that I've realized that my hair looks just fine if it's curly and like properly maintained.

And that is just like a better life to live than trying to make this incredibly curly hair do anything else. Yep. I like it. You have to stick with it. Mine, it just, it's getting in the way. I've been running a lot. Oh, yeah, I'm about to break my monthly running record.

Oh, congrats. What's your monthly running record? I think last summer I ran 454 kilometers one month. Right now I'm at 4 thirty six and there's like what five days left or not four days left oh yeah also too should we say something about pride month I realized when we caught we we recorded the Patricia Chandler three hour mega episode which turned into you know four episodes and then how are you what how are you how are you running that much because i'm not even biking that much i don't know i guess i uh people people are always like oh you must have no free time for

anything and 400 kilometers a month over 30 days is 13k a day which i can run in 60 minutes yeah okay i guess like like like this this week i did 120 kilometers last week because i was hiking in lawson i did 84 the week before i did 135 before that i did 142 so i'm like averaging like 120 a week okay yeah so yeah if you if you basically run every day which i usually take like one or two days off a month and that's the is like, that doesn't mean I'm running crazy hard every day. Like I don't really do tempo days. I, I run either like a decent pace or I take it easy.

So like my, my easy days are like my break days. Um, yeah. And, uh, I, I,

I used, I used to do, I used to do a longer ride on Saturdays and then a shorter ride on most of the weekdays. So I don't bike every day. I have two days a week that I do yoga with my mom. I do exercise every day. I guess that's the difference between us. You do it every day, basically.

I have two days a week I do something else. But now I just do the same route every day. And some days I do like an extra three kilometers. Like the route is like 25 kilometers if I do it exactly. But some days I'll do an extra like three to five. And I used to go to two different bike trails, but now I just go to one just because it's like, I don't know, it's like flatter and more consistent and like closer. And I used to bike to the bike trail, but it's just like more time efficient for me to drive there and then get in a longer, higher intensity workout. Yeah.

Anyways, yeah. So just running lots. But are we supposed to happy pride month i just think yeah we should definitely say something about pride what should we say uh happy pride month um two white guys who consider themselves allies figure out what to say at the end of pride and this won't even come out in pride month this will come out post pride month yeah let's see what should we say what do we say to all our uh lgbtq a plus listeners oh hang on you're breaking up for me no i didn't break up i just i just stopped talking yeah

that was the start of saying something oh man this this podcast is going to be just a mess to edit um yeah happy pride month happy pride month all right i'll cut this up real nice thanks for listening we hope you enjoyed happy belated pride month and have a great day