CppCast - Conference Organizing

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Rob and Jason are joined by Phil Nash, Adi Shavit and Fred Tingaud. They talk with the three meetup and conference organizers about their motivations for launching new C++ conferences last year and discuss some of the work involved in doing so. News CppCon 2019: Saar Raz "How to Implement Your First Compiler Feature: The Story of Concepts in Clang" The New ConanCenter Improves Search and Discovery C++ Inliner Improvements: The Zipliner Meeting C++ Community Survey Links C++ on Sea Core C++ Conference CPPP 2020 Sponsors Write the hashtag #cppcast when requesting the license here One Day from PVS-Studio User Support

Thank you. In this episode, we're joined by three meetup and conference organizers. We talk to them about the motivation and process of launching a C++ developers. I'm your host, Rob Irving, joined by my co-host, Jason Turner. Jason, how's it going today? I am doing all right. Rob, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. Got some stuff going on around the house, but nothing I need to bore anyone with today. Oh, come on. Not like the, what was the saga of the dishwasher that was broken for months or whatever? So, you know, similar to that. You know, if something breaks in your toilet, you can usually

fix it. Like a flapper needs to be replaced, things like that. Yeah. I've done that plenty of times. Um, but this time the, uh, porcelain tank actually physically cracked down the middle and, uh, dumped some water in our bathroom floors. That was nice. Dealing with that right now. And toilet replacing is always a fun job as well.

Yeah. Are you doing it yourself? Uh, no, we're having a plumber come tomorrow i did actually do all of our bathrooms replace them with more updated like good flushing lower water toilets a few years ago the main difficulty was figuring out how to dispose of the old toilet yeah that doesn't sound like that would be a bit of a job yeah yeah just break it up in pieces and like once a week throw it away in the trash. In small paper envelopes.

Pretty much. Okay. Well, on top of our episode, I'll give you a piece of feedback. We got this tweet from Connor Hoekstra at CodeReport, and we got a lot of replies to this tweet saying, Awesome CppCast episode with Sara Raz. CppCon was my favorite talk of CppCon. Find it here. I'll put a link in the show notes for this. For those interested in hearing

more about Circle from Sean Bax, the rival C++ podcast CppChat had him on a couple episodes ago. And I replied to this, I don't consider the CppChat to be a rival. We're all friends here in the C++ podcasting community. Right, Phil? Well, about that. the cpp chat to be a rival we're all friends here in the c++ podcasting community right phil

well about that you've been real friends here yeah well uh we have several guests to go to today so um you know we love to hear your thoughts about the show you can always reach out to us on facebook twitter or email uh but let's let's get to introducing all of our guests today so start off with phil phil's been on the show three and a half times before and hopes to make it to another round number someday he's the original author and original an occasional maintainer of the test framework catch two co-host of rival slash parallel c++ podcast c rival yeah organizer of the c++ london user group and c++ on c conference regular conference speaker giver, and all-around nice guy.

And he's a developer advocate at JetBrains, primarily for their C++ tools, CLion, ReSharper, C++. Phil is East Const, East End Functions, and believes in monads. How you doing, Phil? I'm okay, thank you. I don't believe monads exist, actually. Well, it depends what exists means. That's true.

We've got to introduce another guest before we get into a tangent, Jason. No, no, no. But I do want to ask, though, how did you count three and a half times? I've been on three full times. And then I was on the Lightning podcast, I think, at CKPCon. Okay. Not last year, the year before. I was wondering if that was the case. I couldn't remember.

All right. Okay. We also have Adi Shavat. I'm sorry, Adi Shavat. Adi is Chief Science Officer at SWAP, an entrepreneur, speaker consultant, software architect, and a computer vision and machine learning expert specializing in real-time applications. Adi is the founder of the Core C++ User Group in Israel

and one of the organizers of the Core C++ User Group in Israel and one of the organizers of the Core C++ 2020 conference taking place in May 25th to 27th. How are you doing, Adi? I'm doing wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. Yeah. And last but not least, we have Fred Tingau. Fred is a principal software engineer at Murex, where he maintains the C++ UI and front-end APIs. He's also the creator of Quickbench.com, co-organizer of CPPP Conference, co-host of Paris' C++ Meetup, and organizer of Include. His interests range from code efficiency and readability to UI ergonomics. How are you doing, Fred? I'm doing good, thank you.

So there is perhaps a parallel that our listeners may have noticed, that all three of them are co-runners of conferences or runners of conferences and local meetups yes which i had not actually considered until just that moment that you all actually have your own local meetup which may very well uh help with our conversation yeah so uh jason you had this idea a while ago that all these smaller C++ conferences are popping up in addition to the very large ones like CppCon, Meeting C++, and CppRussia. And we thought it'd be interesting to talk to some of these conference organizers about what that process is like, right? Yep, yep, definitely. I think it's, and it seems like if you go to the ISO CPP conference list, it looks like we've got some new conference like every other week popping up or something like that.

Yeah. It's actually difficult to find a date to slot with your conference in. Yeah. And on that note, and well, I don't know if it's worth getting into at this exact moment, but it seems like you all are pretty much on top of each other this year. Is that right? More so than last year. Although last year there were two conferences, and maybe Fred should talk about this actually, on the same day, which I think we've avoided this year. Right. Yeah.

I think we all had inside information and tried to warn each other about potential dates. So we try to make sure we don't step on each other about potential dates so we try to to make sure we don't step on each other's toes yeah yes well we still have a whole interview to get into but is there a mailing list that people who are interested and you know starting their own conference can join so they know what dates you're looking at if there is one i'm interested in it right i don't know of a mailing list, but there is a channel on the CPP Lang Slack for community

leaders. Okay. If you're a community leader, you can join that and we actually have a monthly call and discuss

these sort of things. Okay. So if you're thinking of organizing a conference or you're running a

meetup or you just want to know what that process is like, that could be worth a look. I'm not sure if it's invite

only or you probably just need to ask somebody who's is like, that could be worth a look. I'm not sure if it's invite only or you probably just need to ask somebody who's already there. Yeah, it's invite only. There is a public channel called Local Groups, so you can start there. If you ask there, someone will send you an invite. Okay. Yeah, plus there's a user

groups channel on the Discord, the Hash Include Discord as well. Okay. Well well we do want to quickly go through a few news items uh three of you feel free to comment on any of these and we'll start talking more about conference running okay okay so this first one is a blog post on conan and it's announcing the new conan center with improved uh search and discovery uh so we haven't talked about conan in a while but that is the you know one of the c++ package managers the one that uh does distribute binaries

and it looks like they've done some work to better integrate into jfrog artifactory and everything should be more searchable now so it sounds like it's a you know nice set of improvements right yeah i uh i mean one of con Conan's strengths is that it's distributed. You can set up your own binary server for inside your organization or whatever. And it's also kind of one of its weaknesses, where if I'm just wanting to use Conan packages in my project, sometimes the discoverability of what packages are available is poor. And this looks like it's going to make it better.

Oh, okay. There might be a hiccup along the way there, where they combined their bin tray repository with Artifactory. So you get both of the results up at once. And as we currently speak, and they may fix this by now, because I know they're looking at it,

if you do a search, it brings up results from both, with no way to distinguish between the two unless you click through to them. So the first thing I did, of course, was search for Catch-2. And you just get two identical results in. So hopefully they're going to fix that and make that a bit clearer. There is an ongoing ticket about it. It does look well.

You have Catch-2 with a lowercase c, Catch with a capital C, and Catch-2 with a capital C. Yes, but I believe one of them is in Artifactory and one is in Bintrey. Well, one of them has 662 downloads. The other two have none. So I'm going to go with the one that looks like it's being used, I guess. But yes, you're right. It's the same version.

Phil, for our listeners, what is Bintrey exactly and how does that relate to Artifactory and Conan? I am completely out of my depth. I've not really used it. But from what I've gathered, it's what they were using to begin with to host binaries. In Catch's case, it's a single header. But for most libraries, you build a binary, they'll actually host the binaries there just to make it a bit easier. And then that's also the wadter artifactory

provides as well so i believe they're going to be moving across to that but i may have got some of that wrong so don't take my word for it okay okay okay uh this next thing we have is a post from the visual c++ blog about uh inliner improvements uh the zipliner which i thought was an interesting name for it. Yeah, everyone have any thoughts on the improvements going on here? Just a general, yay, Visual Studio keeps getting better. I'm just always optimistic. What?

Go ahead, Phil. No, I was just going to say, it looks like they're mostly just changing the time at which optimization is going to occur so that they can do more code generation before they start optimizing it at a later stage to get more of the total view of what's going on before they optimize. Okay. But Adi, it sounds like you're pessimistic. I just said I like to be optimistic that the compiler is probably going to do a better job than I am.

If they find more cases where they can do a better job than they did before, then that's even better. I totally agree. Wasn't there a recent tweet or article or something that asked how has programming changed in the last 20 years? And I didn't respond to it, but my immediate thought was our optimizing compilers have gotten 20 years better yeah definitely okay and then the last thing we have is a meeting c++ community survey and just

wanted to put this out there so that our listeners uh should go in uh response to the survey um it's mostly questions about you, what types of tools you're using with C++, you know, IDEs, unit testing, frameworks, things like that. And, you know, I'm interested to see what all the final results look like. And it seems to just give you one question at a time. Yes. You have to answer a riddle that you have to do in your head. Yes. It looks like you only have to do the riddle once. I think once you've gotten past

the first question, it doesn't give you a new riddle with riddle once. I think once you've gotten past the first question, it doesn't give you a new riddle with each question. But I do kind of wish that you could get like five or so questions on a page. Going one at a time is a little bit lengthy. I think if you're logged in on the site, you don't get that riddle at all. Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't have it. Is it still one at a time?

Consider logging in. Still one at a time, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you have't have it. Is it still one at a time? I consider logging in. Still one at a time, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you have one question. I saw it on my phone. Okay. Yeah, you have the questions and the answer, which I appreciate because I spend more time reading the answers

than answering the question. Right. Some very interesting trends emerging already. Yes. There's a few other questions there I have a personal interest in, like test frameworks and IDEs and things, and they're really giving me some valuable feedback. Lots of people using Catch?

Actually, yes, more than other surveys have said, actually. Oh, that's good. So Google Test obviously is the number one framework according to the survey. Catch is coming in at number two now. Obviously, it's still fairly small numbers and maybe it's a self-selecting audience to some extent as well. But, you know, more interesting data. Cool. Yeah.

Okay. Well, let's get to talking more about conferences, starting with local conferences. I guess just to start off, and we can ask this question to everybody, what motivated you to make a new C++ conference? And I guess we'll start with Phil. Well, you're kind enough to give some of these questions in advance. I've made some notes and I've got pages here, so I'll try and pick out some highlights. Pages? I didn't bring enough to drink for this.

Yeah, how long have you got? I mean, like the other organizers here, I run a user group. I started that first. And in particular, in London, there was already a user group that had C++ content. That was the ACCU London user group, which is still running.

Great user group. If you're in London, you should come along to that. But it wasn't only for c++ content and i had heard a few people mumbling and saying that uh they wanted a pure c++ meetup so i decided to make one it was a breakaway success um and i just wondered if that would uh translate to a conference as well i didn't do it straight away left it a year or two uh and then thought yeah it's time let's do it so um yeah we we gave that a shot and that seems to have worked out really well too and i i have a good relationship

with the accu i'm actually on the committee um love the conference the accu conference as well i was trying to be really careful not to like step on the toes of the accu conference and i think largely that's been a success in fact we are like co-community sponsors of each other as well so uh yeah i mean all all us conference organizers um talk to each other we have a friendly relationship and you know try to try to support each other as well so you're willing to have a rival podcast but not a rival conference that's right yep Okay. Just making sure. Okay. How about you, Fred? So at first I was organizing meetups and everybody would come to me and tell me,

hey, when is the next French conference? I would always answer that I didn't have time to organize that. But still, you know, the idea kind of crept in. And at some point, I went to see Joel and say, oh, how hard do you think it would be to organize a conference? And do you think it would make sense? And we talked about it and came with like this idea of having multiple tracks with multiple approaches to the conference. And we thought that it was something unique. So we thought it had some meaning to do a new conference

on top of all the other ones already existing. Yeah, so that was it. And that's it. Is that Azure? Sorry. Yeah, also we definitely did it with a way too short uh timeline because we organized it in like a few four months or something like that but uh yeah you learn by doing okay how about you

what motivated you well actually i'm just i'm a dreamer you know when i started my when i started my when i wrote the first presentation for the first meetup meeting, I had this slide for the meetup goals. And then I had another slide with stretch goals, which went from the least ambitious to the most ambitious. And my last bullet was to do an international conference. So I had it on my to-do list from day one just because it seemed so fun, you know, and it's meeting great people and giving people the opportunity to meet this amazing community. And I think about just under a year before we had our conference, one of our major sponsors, that was JFrog, we just talked about them earlier,

came up to me and they said, okay, we had a very successful meetup. And they said, okay, let's do very successful meetup. And they said, okay, let's do something bigger. And I, you know, I just, okay, let's do a conference. Okay, let's do a conference. And then things just rolled from there. So I guess I'm more of the kind of, I say yes to everything. And you know, we just try it and see what happens. So yeah. I'm curious, since the three of you just explained the transition, basically, from meetup to conference, how many people did you have in your meetup?

At what point did you say, my meetup is a success, this seems reasonable? You can start with it, it's just going in the same order, Phil. Okay. I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. The meetup actually started out quite strong. We had over 100 signups for like the first few meetups straight away wow okay not every one of those came um and you know it's been between like 60 to 100

people for most most events so i felt you know the the groundwork was was there um but also you know like with adi um had my sights on an international conference, so I did hope to get people from obviously not just London, not just the UK, but particularly Northern Europe and beyond as well, and that certainly happened. I think we had about half of the attendees came from Europe last year. Wow. Okay. Fred? So, sorry, can you repeat the question? Because I was thinking about the last point. Yeah, no, I was just curious how many people you had in your meetup approximately. Yeah, sorry.

So about 80 to 100 for each session. Okay. And we have like a bit more than 1,000 people subscribed to the meetup on meetup.com. Wow. Yes. Yeah, it seems like a lot. But it's mainly because the conference has been around

for a few years and it just grows, you know, because people who stopped going to the conference stayed logged and connected to it. So I don't know how many active members we have, but we manage to have between 50 and 80 people a month.

Okay. Except when there is a huge strike in Paris. As there was last time I visited. And how often is that? Well, I feel 100% of the time when he comes. That's not true. I've been twice and once there wasn't a strike. Oh, okay.

So half of the time. Okay. How about you, Adi? Well, we usually get significantly less people. It depends. Our meetup kind of moves between different towns. So some of them might get about around 20 or 30 people. But we did have larger meetups with around from 60 to 80, maybe even 100 people.

But we do have over 1,000 members on meetup. And we know that many people want to come. And especially if companies would enroll their employees to come during the day to conferences. So we basically hedged our bets. We said, look, we know we can probably get, in a big successful meetup, we can get around between 80 and 100 people. So if we plan our conference such that we get 120 or 150 people, which would cover the cost, then we should be fine.

So that was kind of the risk we took. And we were very, very fortunate that a local community college in Tel Aviv, Jaffa Academic College, essentially donated their facilities for the conference for the first year. So that was probably one of the major expenses that was saved for our conference. And since it's all run by volunteers, we could just about cover the costs. And we sold out about two weeks before the conference. So that was a great success.

It sounds like from what I'm hearing from the three of you that with my meetup, I've got a little over 50 people generally coming, over 600 people on meetup.com. It sounds like I would be right on the threshold of starting a conference in the Denver area. Thank you. I don't think you need another one in Denver, though. A slight problem with that, don't I? Yeah, I think Denver is underserved by conferences. Yeah, between C++ Now and CVPCon, yeah.

All right, so I'll just scratch that one off my list. That's one less thing for me to worry about. Can I make a follow-up point on the number of attendees and user groups, particularly for those just starting or thinking of starting a user group? Don't be put off by hearing people say, oh, yeah, we're getting 60, 100 people or more. There are a few user groups in larger metropolitan areas that do get that, but most user groups are much smaller.

20 to 50 is actually a good number. And there are many that have 5 to 10, and they meet regularly, and they have a great time. That's what it's all about. It's about creating that community. It's not about maximizing the number of attendees. Is JetBrains still sponsoring user groups with Raffle products? They are, yes. And in fact, in that context, it is all about the numbers because you do need a certain minimum number before you can get that sponsorship. But yeah,

if you have a user group that's at least moderately successful, let me know and I'll sort out sponsorship for you. I need to sign back up for that. I let mine drop a couple years ago. I think when I started my meetup, one of the main encouragement that I got was from Jens from Meeting C++, where he told me that his own user group sometimes has five people. I said, okay, Jens from Meeting C++ has five people in his meetup, then I can probably get five people to my meetup. And that's when

I started the group. So yeah, don't be discouraged by, we frequently have 17 to 25 people at a meetup and it's still very, very fun

and people get to know each other and it becomes like a really close-knit, you know, community of friends even though people are from totally different places, different companies.

Yeah, I'm not convinced the number of people at your meetup and the number of people at your conference really match in any way. Okay. For example, I think people from the US are way more used to going to C++ conferences and conferences in general. So I would expect more people to come up to a new conference, while

in France, I'm sure this year we had to overcome the fact that people never went to a conference before in their life. And they had no idea how to buy tickets through their companies and stuff like that. That's one point.

I'm sure there are other reasons. Meeting C++, they are very well known and people come from very far away. So yeah, it's probably not people from the meetup who come to meeting C++. So maybe I'm overthinking this, but are you seeing perhaps like a cultural shift in France now for people being more open to coming to conferences and such? We are trying to create it. We'll see this year if we have more people coming. That is another key thing, by the way, that we haven't explicitly mentioned.

You have all three had exactly one conference and are preparing for your second conference. That's true. And call for speakers is still open for Core C++. So let's do that now. Your call for speakers is still open. Is it closed for the other two? No, it's still open

for CPPP. It's closed for mine. Exactly how many P's was that again, Fred? C, P, P, P. No, I'm just kidding. C++, C, P, P. Okay, so that's two that are still open. How long do our listeners have?

Let's go ahead and mention that right now before that closes. End of February for C++. Okay. Yeah, and C++ is until February 15th. Okay. Kind of the same. At least a month.

Just a month, yeah. Yeah. You should hurry up and submit. I always say this. You don't need to be an expert to speak at a conference. You actually become an expert by speaking at a conference. So I really encourage everybody to submit talks. And, you know,

what's the worst that can happen. I mean, if you don't, if you don't submit, you're not going to get in for sure. Right. Right. I,

uh, I had a user group attendee. Uh, I just suggested to him, I said, the topic you're talking about needs to be a conference talk. And I suggested specifically, um,

uh, C++ now because of the topic. And he was like, oh, but I don't have the project working yet. And I'm like, no, you don't understand how this works. Like, you submit the thing that you want to do, and then you do it, and then you give the talk on it. Totally. Exactly. Yeah, I would recommend to have a good idea that you can do the project beforehand. Oh, yeah.

Oh, no, you know what? I'll go ahead and throw Ben under the bus because he was standing there with this. This is Ben Dean, just for record. I know he listens, whatever. Ben said, he says, but even if you fail at doing the thing that you set out to do, then you have an interesting case study in why you failed. And it could still make a good conference talk.

There is risk to this. I'm not saying that everyone who's a first-time speaker should go out and plan to just, you know, make up something like this. Oh, there is one really important thing that while we're talking and trying to encourage people to submit talks,

is that most international C++ conferences will sponsor accepted speakers for travel and accommodation. That is actually a great point. Please continue. I know we do, and you guys can testify to your own conferences. Yes, I know Core C++ does, and I know C++ on C does. Is that right, Phil? That is right, yes. Okay, then Fred, it's on you.

Yeah, we do too. Okay, so both airfare and accommodations are covered by the conference for all three of you? Yes. With some limits. You're not buying first-class tickets from Australia. Yeah, we try to avoid that. These are volunteer-based

conferences. We try to be reasonable. I have a strict upper limit sabotaged clearly on the website. So, all up front. I found your upper limit last year if it's the same, to be generous for North America.

I've spoken at two of these conferences I haven't been to C++ Paris yet and it worked out well for me with letting the conference sponsor my way I totally appreciate that they are upper limits though so do encourage people to try and save a bit yes

so far we don't have an upper limit last year we had some one of the speaker had health issues so we flight them with actually a more expensive ticket than the usual one so far all the speakers were really willing to find the cheapest flight and help us any way they want. So we hope it will stay this way and we'll not have to add an upper limit. Please don't abuse it. I don't expect most people would try to abuse it, honestly.

I should clarify, actually. When I say there are upper limits, there is still some flexibility there. If someone really can't get a cheaper flight, then we'll talk about that. All right, cool. Yeah. So we actually had, sorry,

we actually scheduled the conference on the same week as the European, the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes. So we had a really tough time finding available hotel rooms, and we paid probably three times as much as we should have for the rooms. So try not to have your conference on a big European...

I think it's like the Super Bowl of Europe in terms of how many people come and watch. Of course, the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest were saying, oh, no, we schedule it at the same time as Core C++. On a parallel podcast, right? That's right. A rival podcast, namely. Right. I wanted to interrupt the discussion for just a moment

to talk about the sponsor of this episode of CppCast, the PVS Studio team. The team promotes the practice of writing high quality code, as well as the methodology of static code analysis. In their blog, you'll find many articles on programming, code security, checks of open-source projects, and much more. For example, they've recently posted an article which demonstrates not in theory, but in practice, that many pull requests on GitHub related to bug fixing could have been avoided if code authors regularly use static code analysis. Speaking of which, another recent article shows how to set up regular runs of the PVS Studio Static Code Analyzer on Travis CI. Links to these publications are in the show notes for this

episode. Try PVS Studio. The tool will help you find bugs and potential vulnerabilities in the code of programs written in C, C++, C Sharp, and Java. Okay, so I'm curious, you know, if you're, you know, running a meetup in your city, you don't have a local C++ conference nearby to go to, and you're interested in this conversation, and maybe starting up your own C++ conference. What does that process look like? Like, what are some of the first things that the three of you all had to do? Is it finding a place where you could host the conference, talking to hotels? Is it talking to speakers? Like, what types of things do you have to do to kind of get the ball rolling?

I guess, Phil, I'll start with you again. Well, there's what you should do first. There's what I did do first. Good job, Phil. I first i first decided right let's do this start looking for venues and actually found a venue and then did what i should have done first which is create a spreadsheet where i start just dumping every possible expense and cash flow that i can think of in there and then like leave a gap for venue costs to see what your budget's going to be like and of course you know it's not going to be anywhere close to the actual amount to begin with,

but it's a starting point that you can then work from. And then every time you get any more concrete figures, or you can narrow your range or something, update that spreadsheet. And at some point, you start to get some confidence in it. And there is this scary point where you actually start having to put deposits on things and pay for flights, or at least book hotels and things like that. And at that point, you should be fairly confident. So I would highly recommend before you get to that point,

you chat with one of us or some of the more experienced conference organizers to try and get an idea of what sort of things have I missed because you will have missed things. And those things will cost money and you need to make sure that you can cover it. So yeah, having that spreadsheet there and having it central to the whole process, especially early on, I think is absolutely essential.

And I think I did get it in in time, so we were okay. That makes it sound like having a credit card with a fairly high limit at your availability so you can float these costs until the payments start coming in. What almost be a prerequisite? Not necessarily. It may even be a disadvantage because you may start blindly paying for things before you've really fully thought it through. Yeah.

I think it pays to be a bit frugal to start with a bit conservative because if it's your first event, you really don't know what those costs are actually going to be in practice, and B, who's going to turn up, who's going to sponsor. You also need to find where that breaking point is, how many people you're going to need to come before you stop making a loss. It all sounds quite scary, but when you pass that point, it's such a relief.

We might not actually lose money. So, and also, you can start selling tickets early on, even before you've announced speakers. That's the early bird tickets. It helps the first time if you're really sort of fairly well established in the community. So if you're not, you're going to have a harder time convincing people to come to a conference

they've never heard of before, a conference they've never heard of before by someone they've never heard of before with no speakers signed up. But once you get the first, you only need a few ID Bird ticket sales to start being able to put deposits on venues and hotels and things. So that can really go a long way as well.

Okay. And then maybe I should hand over to someone else, actually. Yeah, Fred, do you have any thoughts on that? So the problem is everything depends on everything else. Like you need to choose a venue, but you need to know how many people you want to put in the venue. And they will ask you what's your budget, but you have no idea what your budget is because you want to

know which one you have and how many days and stuff so yeah it's kind of a bootstrap of um i tend to go to the people i know first like talk with uh speakers i know and uh talk to companies i know and stuff because uh the first time they will ask you questions you will not be able to answer. So if you're talking with somebody from a company that you already know and they trust you and they ask you what's the venue and you're

like I don't know because I'm for the moment I'm just fishing for people to give me money to organize it and I'll choose the venue depending on that. And so you cannot answer that to a big company that you don't know. Yeah. So try to see with your network of people you know first.

Start making ideas. And as it becomes clearer how it's going to happen, you can see with everything. So for the first year, you handpicked your speakers uh do you feel like that was a good way to really like bootstrap this and relieve some of the pressure yes definitely we did not have enough time to to create a call for paper and review everything and stuff uh we would not have been able to do that i think okay also we had this weird three tracks with different subjects or different names which i haven't seen anywhere else so we wanted to be to make uh to be sure that everybody understood what we meant with uh

contacting speakers it was easy with an with a CFP, you have to... It can be confusing for the first time. Okay. Now we did some talk. We have some examples of talk that can go in each track. So it seems easier to create a CFP this year. Just to back that point up,

I mean, I did have a CFP for the first year, but I would absolutely say there are so many moving parts you need to keep on top of that you would often never have thought of before. Anything you can do without the first time, do without it. Because

everything else will overwhelm anyway. And then you can say, well, next year we'll look at that. And in fact, that's what I've done with some other things. So yeah, that's absolutely the right way to go. Yeah, I think the first thing is get the venue. At least know that the venue is available. Even if you're paying for it, you need to know it's available. You need to make sure that you can tell people the dates,

you can tell sponsors the dates. I think that one of the first things I did was actually talk to other organizers. So I've been to several conferences over the last two years. And I basically went up to all the organizers, you know, to just talk to them, understand the way each of the conferences work. I spoke a lot, I got a lot of information from Phil and from the people running the NDC, the various NDC conferences. And each one gave me different tips and different ideas and different approaches and and what we should do um and i think maybe the most most important thing is to find the early sponsors basically

you need to get as many sponsors as possible uh at the very early stages and then you don't really need that extra a lot of credit because they they get the special early bird sponsorship and one of the things we did and this is is something I got from the NDC folks, is that every sponsor actually got a whole bunch of tickets, free tickets included with the sponsorship package. So this both fills up your conference with actual attendees and it gives them something extra beyond just being a sponsor. So they're actually getting additional value for their sponsorship.

And it encourages them to actually come and become sponsors early on. One other thing that we did that I don't know about other conferences is that we hooked up with a local nonprofit organization dedicated to providing open source software accounting services. So basically, they handled all of the money, all of the credit cards. They have their own bank account, so they can give us some credit until the money comes in. And they did all the contracts. And I actually thought most of the

their interaction is going to be with the actual ticket uh buyers the attendees and it turned out that the biggest headache actually comes from the sponsors because each one has they have their own ndas and their own contracts and these guys want to pay uh after net 30 and net 60 and even after like i think the last the last attendees that we had, I think the last people who bought tickets actually paid just a couple of months ago. So those are the last people they had to chase down. Oh, you mean like a couple of months ago for the conference that was in May? Yes.

Yes, exactly. So people, you know, companies that purchase tickets, but they said they'll pay later. Yes, exactly. So people, you know, companies that purchase tickets but they say they'll pay later. So luckily for me, this NPO actually handled a lot of, almost all of that trouble for us. A lot of the headaches that

Phil was talking about kind of fell on them, which was really, really nice for us. And additionally, we had a production company. So I don't know anything about running conferences. We just had this amazing lady, and she was, we called her, like she was the conference star. She basically bossed us around.

She said, okay, you have to prepare such and such T-shirt design and sign designs by tomorrow or by the end of the week and tell me how many um choose the menus for the lunch and choose the the whatever everything and they took care of the rest um so well if this is your first conference it's probably a really good idea to try to find a production company and they often handle all of the suppliers so of course they take some kind of cut um but it's definitely for us it's worked really really well uh in in terms of there was somebody telling us what to do on the logistical side so that was really helpful and we actually started a lot of this just three or four weeks before the conference for various reasons.

So, yeah. Did either Fred or Phil, did you use a production company? I wish I had. I did not. Now that I hear about it. Sorry. Yes, we were talking over each other. Go ahead, Fred, and then Phil.

Yeah, I said I wish I knew it existed. Oh, okay. So you didn't even know it was an option no yeah okay no i i didn't use a production company um but uh it's not just me running the conference um actually in a partnership on this with my wife as it happens who's really good at organizing things but um doesn't know anything about the technical side so that's like quite a nice clear demarcation of responsibilities but she also knows nothing about um conferences in the c++ or tech world so i've also had to teach her a lot of that um bearing in mind i've not done it myself so that's been quite fun to to use the euphemism um but we definitely learned a lot, but it's worked.

I think we got quite lucky in some respects. Like Adi was talking about hassles with sponsors. We didn't really have any of that. In fact, I had it on the to-do list. Start contacting sponsors. Before I had a chance to get to that point, sponsors were coming to me. And I all paid

pretty quickly so um that was actually that worked out really nicely it could have gone badly but um but we got lucky well on a number of fronts so i do have to put some of it down to luck um but we definitely learned a lot of the process as well it does a lot of work so would the three of you recommend going to the companies you currently work for to sponsor? I know Phil, I'm pretty sure JetBrains sponsored your conference. But that's what JetBrains does regularly, right? Mine too. Oh, yours too as well?

Okay. So this is my blanket question. Was there any conflict of interest or is this a highly recommended thing to do to go to your company? I did, and I'm very happy that Merix definitely helped with the first CPPP. So I was very interested in the project, and they were the ones, when I said, go see people you know, clearly they helped a lot because they asked me questions,

very basic questions, and I had no idea how to answer. I would have been very bad if it were anybody else but these people, because they really wanted to help. Okay. Just going back on the production company and stuff like that we were talking just before, also one thing that can be very important is the venue, how professional they are. We went with a very professional venue used to conferences like that because I also visited other venues that were very, very nice, but were not technical conferences venues per se. And they started asking me questions like like are you sure you need a screen in each of the rooms and stuff like that and if it's your first conference and you end up and

realize that they didn't put screens in the rooms or they didn't put sound or anything it can be very very bad wow so i would say go with avenues that knows how to work uh with conferences a good point we had uh actually we had to argue the the video production company uh we said aren't you going to tape the hdmi output and he said no no it's okay we're gonna just send us the slides and then uh one of our speakers was hannah hannah yeah uh yeah yeah hannah everybody knows hannah so yeah and you know we had to he actually had to edit those animated slides somehow from a pdf produced and oh yeah next year i'm definitely gonna put the extra hardware to record the hdmi i've never had a conference like this yeah for for me as well like i you want my slides okay they're not going to do you any good but you

can have them if you want them yeah but have you seen hannah ducy crovas torch because like she has she has physics in her slides like so there is no way you you do the same thing twice and you don't have the same result. It's absolutely impossible to record that. Just to back Fred's point up about making sure you know who you're working with in terms of the venue and what stuff they have. I have to be careful what I say, but the venue that we use,

they had their own tech staff and they were pretty good. But they clearly hadn't really worked with the sort of conferences that we put on. They were fine with screens in every room, but they had maybe different expectations about what they should look like, how big resolution of projectors and things.

Some of the equipment didn't quite work as smoothly as we would like. Next year, this year now, we're going to try to bring much more of that in ourselves from a third-party company. And I think that should hopefully smooth over some of the issues we had. I mean, it wasn't a disaster, but it could have gone a bit smoother if we hadn't relied quite so much on the venue knowing what they were doing in the context of the type of conference we're trying to do. So, yeah, even if they talk the talk, you you do need to double check that they know what they're getting

themselves into as well yeah i as a speaker totally believe all of that because you never know what's going to happen yeah even with real pros like we had uh they were still like oh we have this app that you download on your presenting machine and it records the slides. I was like, no, I'm not going to ask every single speaker to download this app. I have no idea what kind of machines they have.

No, no, it works. It works even on Mac. Does it work on Linux? Yeah, exactly. Those Linux. So, yeah. C++ conferences are very, very special even for technical conferences.

But I think you need some luck. I'm a youth, Phil. Maybe beginner's luck, so I hope we're not running short this year. So that's a good question. I mean, all of you must be working on your second year conferences. We talked about the call for papers being open for two of them. Do you find it's easier the second time around as you're preparing for the second go of it, Phil?

Yes and no. In theory, yeah. I've learned a load of stuff from the first year. There's lots of stuff we can reuse or that's already done once and for all time. There's some churn on some things as well. But there was a lot of things, as I said earlier, things that you can put off

that you don't absolutely have to do the first time. Like we had a call for speakers, but it was just run through Google Forms. And then I hacked together some scripts to pull that down into my little database. It was all held together by bits of string, which was fine for the first time. But the idea was always,

let's do it properly next year. So there's all these things that I wanted to do the next year that we're now doing. So it's actually probably more work than the first one. But that's my choice, I suppose. And you have the better users of your tools, right?

Oh, yeah. So I've built my own call for speakers system that also has reviews built in. And I'm aiming to open it up as a platform at some point. And I actually already have my first early bird or early access customer um hope he doesn't mind me saying that uh but the core c++ for speakers is run on that platform no i don't mind if people if people complain now i can say oh yeah yes that's a generally a good idea to

have it set up so that you can blame Phil if something goes wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Or if something goes wrong with mine, I can say, I did that. It works both ways. Anything you would like to add to this, uh,

how things go the second time around Fred? Well, uh, this year we are doing two days instead of one. We are doing it during the week instead of during the weekend and stuff, but it's still simpler because we during the week instead of during the weekend and stuff. But it's still simpler because we have one year instead of four months. That's true.

Also, it's becoming shorter and shorter as time passes. Yeah, I should hurry up a bit. But yeah. Yeah, having the extra time doesn't help if you don't use it. Exactly, yeah. That's true. Yeah. Having the extra time doesn't help if you don't use it. Exactly, yeah. That's true. Yeah, we actually needed to find a new venue because the previous venue was too small.

As I said, we sold out a couple of weeks before the conference and we wanted to add another track, so we needed another large hall. So that took quite a while to finalize, to find the new venue and to finalize the contract because they were we actually need to pay these guys so we kind of started a bit late but I think we're fine

now we're going to put in some more effort in the upcoming weeks and hopefully everything will run smooth and we're already getting a lot of interesting speakers and probably by the end of the last day we're going getting a lot of interesting speakers. And probably by the end of the last day, we're going to get most of them. It's the 90-20, what is it? 80-20 rule, 90-10 rule?

80-20, yeah. Go ahead. 80% of the speakers submit their talks 20 minutes after the deadline. Right, right. So for people listening, I'm not saying delay to the last moment. Make these guys' jobs easier, but they're not turning off the website at that moment either. Don't tell them. That's a secret.

Yeah, it's a secret. Sorry, I didn't mean to say that. There is another piece of inside information that might help people submitting talks, which is that for a lot of the call for speaker systems, the reviews are actually started in the order that talks are submitted. So particularly if they start reviews before the call for speakers closes, the earlier you get your review in, the more chance you're going to get reviewed by somebody earlier in the process and anybody that's been on a program committee knows that you start out sort of really um idealistic in your in your reviews and as the deadline approaches to get your reviews done you start to rush more and more and it's like that principle with you know don't don't end up before a judge uh just before lunch or something because they're rushing to or they're hungry. You don't want to be one of those last talks to be reviewed because you're less likely to be seen favorably. That's all I'll say.

I would like to put in a feature request into your submission system, Phil, that you randomized the order. I have randomized it for exactly that purpose. Okay. Yeah, I mean, TLC++ also randomizes because of that another reason to submit earlier is that we we look at the proposals and sometimes we we notice uh things that are not clear or could be improved it's possible that we contact people who did the CFP. And if they submit 20 minutes after the closing, we don't have time to send them a mail saying,

oh, could you improve that point? Because we don't see if it's good or not. Okay. That's a great point. That's... Yeah, so how... There's one more... No, go ahead, please.

There's one more thing that I think is from... is important to understand about how the program committees work is that they're not, at least in many conferences, they're not 100% related to the way... We're losing you, Adi. We're losing you, Adi. Okay. Okay. You're better now.

Came back. Wait. Okay. Maybe. I didn't do anything, but I won't touch anything. I'm going to go again. Perhaps you should stop your video. Yeah, Adi, I want you to turn your video off and see if...

Can I turn this video off? Okay. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Can you hear me now? Is this better? We're doing so well. We were.

Almost a full hour in, yeah. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I'll just imagine. So anyway, one of the things I think is really important

is that the program committees in many at least in some of the countries don't only look at the rating of the talks Adi I'm afraid we're still losing you hold on you know what let me disconnect

it's so full because we hear you saying the very important thing is... Yeah. And then we don't have the answer. The minimum life is... 42. He disconnected. Maybe he's going to rejoin. Jason, you had a question to Asynch.

You were about to say something. Oh, I had a question slash comment. I guess while he dials back in, maybe we could get everyone else's opinion on this. In conferences that I've submitted to, it seems like it's most likely that I just get the results of my submission and say... Okay.

Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, is this better? No, maybe not. We did. Adi, turn your video off again. Okay. better wait give it a minute it's really strange maybe it's the audacity i can stop it and then restart it no no leave audacity running don't don't touch audacity don't touch audacity that makes rob's life much harder okay much much harder people will have the audacity sound and be like, I don't understand why they didn't hear what he was saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, can you hear me now? Is this one, two, three, four, five? You sound okay right now. Yeah, hurry up and talk really quick. Okay, so the answer to the question of life is... Okay.

All right. So what I wanted to say was that the program committees don't choose the... Okay, I'm not going to... This is my secret. Well, I don't know what's going on, but I'll try to move the conversation forward. I'm sorry, Adi. And hopefully if it comes back, you can... But it seems like with a lot of conference systems, I submit my talk and then I find

out you were accepted or you were not accepted, and here's the reasons why. And it sounds like, at least with some of you, that there's some possibility with your conferences that someone who submits early might get feedback saying, hey, we would kind of like to accept your talk, but we don't understand point B. Is that what you were saying, Fred? Yes. Okay. It's probably not just point B. Oh, sure. There was this person, I think she came to your podcast, Sabadby,

who talked at CppCon about a series of bugs she debugged. Oh, yes. Yeah. So in your podcast, she said that she wrote something way too short. And she had a mail from CppCon telling her that it was too short. And could she please write a bit more about the subject? Okay. And she did.

And she was accepted. That's kind of the thing. So I'm not surprised that you are not contacted because you did a few CFPs in the past. You know how it works. But sometimes you see that, yeah, clearly this person is writing their first

CFP, and they don't realize the level of detail expected from them or something like that. And in that case, you can just give them another chance if the subject seems interesting. Right. Okay.

Yeah, I made a couple of editorial comments like that. So it's not really part of the review process, but just to say, you might want to think about doing that a little bit differently. Just as I happened to notice, I didn't look through all of them. What I had wanted to do this time, but it's been put off now till the next time,

is to actually put in a real time feedback system. So you can, as a reviewer go in and say, you know, can we get more information on this? And that goes back anonymously to the, the submitter. And they have a chance to feed that back before the review completes.

There's obviously some complexities to that. I didn't get it in this time, but that that's definitely the plan for hopefully for the next time. I feel like if your conference has the goal of getting new speakers or more diverse speakers or whatever, that that could be hugely helpful for people who just are unfamiliar with the entire process. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and people who don't have somebody they can talk to easily who goes to conferences. Right. But I'd say even for experienced speakers, people who don't have somebody they can talk to easily who goes to conferences. Right, right. But I'd say even for experienced speakers, I mean, I've done one or two talks before, but I still sometimes get rejected or even accepted, you know, with caveats at a conference. And it would have been nice to have been able to respond to feedback earlier and say, ah, yeah, that's a good point. If I just change that and then it changes everything.

But yeah, it is frustrating, that's a good point. If I just change that, and then it changes everything. Yeah, it is frustrating because I feel people's pain. I would like to change it for my own conference. And everybody that uses my platform. It only cost $100 per note. I guess we should mention, Rob, for the

sake of our listeners or viewers here, that we did have some audio problems with Adi, which is why you may not be hearing from him at the moment. He is still online. Don't know what the status is at the moment, though. I'm fine. I can hear you. Okay. You can hear us.

Adi might be back. Okay. All I wanted to say was that we take into account many different aspects of the talk. So as Phil mentioned, if you're a new speaker, or Fred mentioned this, the program committee takes into account many different aspects related to the talk. So don't think that if you haven't spoken before, your chances are somehow different, or even experienced speakers get rejected or not accepted is the more accurate term but there are many many many different reasons why some talks are accepted so

i really encourage everyone especially first-time speakers we're always looking for new faces and new speakers because that's where all the new people come from and the new speakers. And so go ahead and submit. Okay. So to close this out, I was wondering if we could maybe go around one more time and ask if there's any kind of like closing piece of advice you might have for someone who is thinking about starting their own conference. Phil?

You can also pitch your conference while you're at it too. Yeah, do that too. Yeah, so I put down in my notes that the first answer to this question is don't. But I think if you've decided this is what you want to do, make sure you know why you want to do it. Because if it's just like, oh, it seems like a good idea, that's probably not going to cut it.

You need to be really determined to follow through on this. There's potentially financial risk. There's a lot of time investment um it's gonna you know take over your life for at least certain parts of the year um and that may be fine if you can justify it but make sure you know why and in particular if your motivation is to make money out of it then i go back to one, which was don't. Very few people make lots of money from conferences. Many don't even break even, particularly industry conferences often make a loss. And even if you do make money, you probably would have made more by putting that same amount of time into some other project. So make sure you know what you want to get out of it. That would be my main recommendation. Okay.

Fred? Yeah, I agree. Don't do it for money. It's definitely not a good idea. What would I recommend? Yeah, try to find what makes your conference unique because there are more and more conferences and you want yours to stand out among them.

So yeah, have something unique in it, a reason why people would want to go there, although there are all those other conferences already existing. Also, you should propose a talk to CPPP. And also, you should probably

ask your company if they want to sponsor a conference because that way you can go for free to the conference and also you help the community that's definitely good advice I forgot to plug my conference sorry before we carry on obviously the conference speakers is closed

but tickets are on sale and in particular early bird tickets are still running but that's going to stop soon because hopefully within the next week or so as we record, so even less time by the time you listen to this, the schedule will be announced. And at that point, early bird pricing finishes. So now's your chance to get the cheaper tickets. So your notion of early bird pricing is pay before you know what's going to happen. Yes, and that makes sense.

You're taking on some risk. You get something back for that right yeah okay um yeah so i think one of the major things is talk to other organizers go on slack go to meet them at conferences everybody's super friendly and very helpful and just talk to them, figure out, like Fred said, what can make your conference special, especially if it's in a place that people want to visit. Like people would ask me, yeah, I want to go to Israel. Are you going to have a conference? So if you're in some really nice place,

that's a really big plus because many international speakers might be interested in coming. So yeah, and just try to know your community. I wouldn't do it just wake up in the morning and without knowing who's around me trying to go and do that. Try to know your community. Use some personal connections to try and find the first sponsors,

whether it's big regular sponsors like JetBrains or JFrog, but also I think all of us on the program committee basically sent direct emails to companies that we work for or companies that we worked for and said, hey, look, we're having this conference. Why don't you come and become a sponsor? So try to use your network to get the sponsors and to get the word out, because there are a lot of what's called dark matter programmers and it's really hard to find them. So try to share and use social media. I think this is really important. It's been really helpful for us. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,

I think Instagram maybe. As many social media outlets as you can to get people to hear about your conference and try to interact I do try to post on Twitter on social media at least as we come close to the conference at least once or twice a day not more okay so yeah I had the last pledge yeah I go on go on includes this road that's definitely the only place where I've seen I had the last plug. Go on Include's Discord. That's definitely the only place where I've seen some subjects discussed at large about inclusivity for your conference. About, yeah, a lot of subjects of inclusivity that I had never thought about before being on Include.

And it really helped for the organization of the conference. Okay. Yeah, and you can go get a code of conduct from include right absolutely yeah i think there is actually a conference pack for conference organizers to code of conduct but also many other thoughts oh yeah i had this bullet point of all the things you need to do also i definitely need to update it now that I've organized actually a conference. Okay. Well, thank you so much, the three of you,

for coming on and doing this show with us. I know it was a different type of episode than our average CppCast episode, but these conferences are really important. It's how we kind of learn new things as a community. So I'm really glad that the three of you are running new conferences and maybe some more will spring up after this.

Let's hope so. Thanks for having us. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.

Can we say sleep today? Wrong podcast. Wrong one. Wrong one. That's what he's all for. Thanks so much for listening in as we chat about C++. We'd love to hear what you think of the

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