CppCast - CppCon 2020 Wrapup

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Rob and Jason are joined by Jon Kalb. They talk about the first on-line CppCon conference and plans for the future. Links CppCon CppCon 2020 YouTube Playlist C++Now Sponsors PVS-Studio. Write #cppcast in the message field on the download page and get one month license PVS-Studio is now in Compiler Explorer! Free PVS-Studio for Students and Teachers

Episode 266 of CppCast with guest John Kolb recorded September 19th, 2020. Sponsor of this episode of CppCast is the PVS Studio team. The team promotes regular usage of static code analysis and the PVS Studio static analysis tool. In this episode, we talk about the first online CPP con with its organizer, John Kald. Welcome to episode 266 of CppCast, the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. I'm your host, Rob Irving, joined by my co-host, Jason Turner. Jason, how are you doing? I'm doing all right. Rob, how are you doing? Doing okay. We just finished up a week of virtual CPPCon. I think it went pretty well.

You? Yeah. Yeah, I was here for most of it as well. I was here at the conference in Colorado, just for the record. Yeah, I wonder if you're one of the closest ones to the actual conference venue, probably. Of the locals that I know, I am probably the closest ones to the actual conference venue probably of the locals that i know i am probably the closest could have gotten there in person just for the sake of it yeah someone suggested that and i said no i don't feel like driving over to the gaylord just for the fun of it

okay well you could have done it one day and then say, I am streaming from the Gaylord Rockies. Where the heck are you guys? I could have, and that might have been fun, but it was more fun to not drive over there. Okay, well, a topic of sort of like 3DPs of feedback. We did have this series of tweets that came to my attention. This was Corentin, who we've had on the show before. I guess he got a new microphone and he was showing it off. He got it right after he was on a Birds of the Feather panel, I think. And he talked about maybe wanting to be on a podcast again. And someone said, I would love to hear you ranting for about 30 minutes each week. And maybe they should start a new podcast. You could call it CPP Rant. It might get more listeners, honestly.

I could think of a couple other potential co-hosts to be on a CPP Rant podcast. That could be good. Yes, I can think of a few guests that they could have on as well. Well, that's what CPP Chat is, right? We just do ranting. We just listen to me rant most of the time. But I like to get Robert Ramey on, let him rant. I'm still working on getting Vinny on because I'm sure he would do some great ranting for us.

Vinny could as well, yeah. Well, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the show. You can always reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, or or emails at feedback at cpcast.com and don't forget to leave us a review on itunes or subscribe on youtube and you've already heard him our guest today is john called john does on-site and online training on c++ but is best known as a conference chair for c++ now and cpp con john welcome back to the show well it's great to be back um i think this is my fourth time sounds right yeah we had i don't know if that's still a record because i think you've had some other people who i don't think it's a record yeah we

had scion earlier in the week and i think they're the current record holder yeah oh we might need to do some some you know count up exactly uh like the top 10 yeah well it seems it seems like it's been a long time since I've been on. It has been a while. So, yeah, love chatting with you guys. Well, it's not like I haven't chatted with you, so it's great to stay in touch. So you guys, what did you think of the conference?

How did it go for you? Aren't we supposed to be the one asking you questions, John? I'm turning the tables this time. No, no. I mean, I'll start. I think the conference went really well. I think the platform overall, you know, we use this Remo platform for virtual conferences. I think it worked really well. It was nice being able to sit at a table and chat with people, which was not that dissimilar from the physical experience of just you know joining a ring of people and

having a post session talk i think that that was good i i wish more people had their cameras on all the time yeah you did notice a a trend where if you saw a table where people were hanging out and talking then it became like a magnet and it filled up real quick because there would on any given floor in any given hall tracks uh session there was maybe three tables that were really active yeah but it worked out right i was surprised at how it still felt nearly as exhausting as actually going to a conference what the the heck? That's our goal. Forget engagement, forget content. Our goal is just to exhaust you.

Well, in some ways, this could be even more exhausting because I know some people talked about how, okay, there was this one slot where there were like three or four talks. I wanted to see all of them. So I had to make my choice. But afterwards, I could click on Sked and the scheduling platform

and the YouTube links were available there. So you could watch the other talks immediately after. So some people I know spent a lot of time catching up on everything. So this transition has been really, really challenging. I mean, we didn't know until really weeks ago and less than a couple of months ago that we were going to be virtual because we have a contract with the hotel. And from their point of view, it's like, you know, and they were really accommodating in a lot of ways, but they wanted us to have the event it's like you can make it small you don't have to worry about because we've you know we have some pretty expensive minimums that we've signed up for on their on the contract and they said well don't worry about that just

have the conference and but it was you know the number of registrations we had i mean it was just finally they said okay go ahead and announce it's canceled and that's when we said okay we're doing this thing virtual but earlier in the year, we'd certainly discussed, well, what is a conference about? Why do we have this? And I've known for a long time. I've always told people, you know, the benefits you get from the conference, it's kind of twofold. One is you get to talk to other people. It's less about what the talk is than about the fact that you're going there with a bunch of other people who think that's a talk worth going to.

In other words, it's the crowd that's there, the conversations you have there. And we've always called it the hallway track. I understand that's what the real value is. And that's why we can give away the videos and still have a conference that people are willing to pay money and take a week off and go to, even though they can watch the videos later. It's because the crowd that's there is the people you want to spend some time talking to. You're going to get great ideas from them. You're going to, you know, lots of stuff. So that's part of it. But the other part of it

is when you go to a conference, it means you've negotiated with both of your bosses, as I say, your work boss and your home boss, that you are not going to have other responsibilities. You get to spend one week focused on C++. And those two things make the conference worth doing, even if you can watch all the sessions for free. You know, one of the things I've told people as a thought experience, imagine going into your boss and saying, hey, I'm going to save you a lot of money. You don't have to send me to Colorado. You don't have to put me up in the hotel.

And you don't have to pay for the conference. I'm just going to sit at home all week long and watch conference videos. Ross is not going to go for that, are they? Right? It's the setting aside the week. That's the thing. Because even though, you know, all the videos are free online, but you're not going to watch them all. You will if you go to the conference. And even then, you can't see them all because we have so many tracks. But that's and and i've known these things i've known these things all this time and yet when i was faced with what are we going to do for an online conference it's like well why would anybody do that and then i began to realize what we have to do is figure out how to make it interactive so that you're still you're still engaging with

that same crowd that's what the real value is and think, and that's what we tried to do. We thought every second was, how do we increase interactivity? How do we make it so that the attendees realize there's other attendees that are interested in the same things? You have conversations with them. And I'm not certain that everything we tried worked,

but the feedback I'm getting is similar to what you guys said, which was, yeah, it felt like a conference. You actually were having conversations and it was, you know, it had some of the same pluses and minuses of a real conference. My goal also is to do things that we can do with an online conference that we can't do on site. In other words, let's at least, there's a lot, you know, we didn't have a dinner. We didn't have a field trip. We didn't do, you know, we didn't do those things, but there are things that we can do online that we can't do on site. Um, and one of them is we made the videos available in raw form immediately so that if you

missed a session, you could immediately, uh, and in fact, you could even press pause if you wanted, right? So, so that's something that you can't do in real life that, that we can enable with the online. And then there's other things that one of the things that we're planning to do is, is what I'm calling the follow-up Q and A. And the idea is that there's a session you missed because you went to a different session and you can watch the video, but it means you can't ask questions because, well, that's done. So what we're going to do is we are going to, and we haven't scheduled them all, and so we don't know exactly the details. So I haven't really been pushing it hard.

But what we're going to do is we're going to have speakers back, and the online attendees can come back online, and we are going to watch together their talk with the speaker in the chat room. So they can chat while the talk's going on. And then at the end, do another Q&A, a live Q&A with the same speaker. So they're not having to give their talk again. We've got that recorded. But we still have the experience of other attendees chatting about it.

This is one of the things that was, again, something that you can kind of do this on site if people get out their phones and chat, but it doesn't work really well. But online, this is what we had. We had the chat window going on while people are talking. In some sessions, it didn't work as well because there wasn't a lot of chat. But in other sessions, you had knowledgeable people answering questions that the speaker was talking about. And somebody said, well, wait a minute. How does that work? And somebody comes on and explains how it works while the speaker, you know, you don't, you know, this is, this is exploiting what we can do. It's not as good. There's no question. It's not as good an experience, but that doesn't mean that we can't have that commitment to be exclusive.

In other words, they were making, there were interruptions and you know, the boss was, does want you to come to this meeting virtually because it's a virtual meeting anyway. And you know, you still are doing that.

So it's, so it's probably never going to be as good an experience for that reason, if no other reason. Yeah. Some of our friends in the central European time zone were told that they had to do a full work day before they could do their conference day. So they were. That's not right.

No, that's not right. But on the other hand, they at least got to come. So for some people, we talked to a lot of people. It was like, I've always wanted to go to CPPCon. And this is the only way I ever could because they can't get away for a week because they can't afford that much travel because they can't get a visa to the u.s whatever the reason so it's not as good but it's way better than just watching the videos on youtube so i'm

excited about that and we're exploring that and we don't know what the answer is going forward i i envision a hybrid conference and in, because there are some features of the virtual, what I think is that the people who attend online will actually have a package for them where they can buy both the onsite ticket and also a virtual ticket as well, so that they can watch the immediate streaming and be involved in some of the online stuff, like the follow-on callbacks and stuff. So that's kind of my goal, is it's going to be a different creature, but it can be a good creature.

And it will be less nice, but better than nothing. And I don't mean that in that just barely better than nothing. It'll be really nice, but not as nice as being there on site. You're definitely hoping for a physical CBP con next year then, in other words. Well, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm hoping eventually we'll have, you know, yes. I think, yes, I'm optimistic that we'll see it by next September. Sure. Actually, our dates, we haven't officially announced the date. So this is an exclusive for you guys.

The dates are actually late October. And that had nothing to do with COVID or anything like that. I was thinking I'll tell people, oh, we wanted to give them a few more weeks to get everything good. But the truth is that we had a conflict with the hotel when we originally signed years ago. When we signed with the hotel, we knew this particular year, next year, the 21, was going to be bad for us because we didn't get the September dates. They had conflicts and we couldn't get those dates. But anyway, so I'm hoping that we'll be on site next year. And I kind of would be crazy to think by 2022, for sure we will. But my point is that even when we get back to the new normal, I want to have a hybrid, what we're calling a hybrid conference, right? I want to have this

ability for people to attend online. And we don't know exactly what that means. But what it means for me is a way of engaging with other people who are interested in what we do, which is C++. So that's what it's about for us and figuring out how to exploit the technology that we do have in the best possible way. I've heard the argument in the past that these conference centers just don't have enough bandwidth for us to live stream all of these talks. That sounds like something that would have to be addressed in some way, unless that's just a rumor that I've heard or something like that. Well, the Gaylord is very modern, and we can have all the bandwidth that we're willing to overpay for. It is extremely expensive.

But one of the things that I'm experimenting with mentally, trying to figure out how does this work, is maybe we won't stream all the tracks. You know, we have eight tracks, and my goal at the Gaylord, frankly, is to have more tracks. We have a lot of speakers who want to speak. They're presenting good ideas. Why not give them that opportunity, record it, put it on YouTube? So my hope is to have more and more tracks.

But I'm not certain that that's really necessary for online. This year we had fewer tracks for the online conference. And I'm training myself to say on-site and online, not real and virtual, because it's... So, yeah, I think we may have a situation where only some of the on-site tracks actually make it online. Part of the problem is, you know, this was an issue that we originally talked about in 2014. We were trying to deal with the expense of recording sessions. And so one of the things we thought about is, well, maybe we'll only record certain tracks.

Other conferences do, in fact, do that. Some tracks aren't recorded and some are. But one of the problems with that is that you get in this perverse thing where the speakers really, really want to be recorded. So they put pressure on you. Can't I be in this other track? And then the attendees, of course, you want to record the more popular tracks, right? But the attendees are saying, wait a minute, if that's not going to be recorded, then I want to go see it. So you have attendees

avoiding the popular tracks because they think they... And so we've really, really tried to treat all the sessions are the same. Some are in bigger rooms, some are in smaller rooms, but they're treated the same. They're all recorded. They all go in one. So this year, or excuse me, going forward, we may be in a weird situation of saying, well, yeah, these tracks, they are recorded. They will be on YouTube, but they may not be streamed live. There's a whole bunch of questions for us to answer.

You know, one of the things is, do we stay with Remo? Remo has been, it was really a find for us. It came from C++ on C. Phil told me somebody was using it for some local group stuff. And so he used it for C++ on C and we used it. And it does have this just really cool feature of you being able to sit at a table and having what I call a Zoom-like experience where there's just a few people talking. And then when the speaker is ready,

when the time is, all of the cameras and microphones at all those tables shut off, and then we present from the speaker. And that's a nice transition. It simulates what happens at a real conference where you're going and you're chatting with the people next to you. And then the speaker comes on. And so that's what's cool about Remo. But Remo has other kind of quirky, weird limitations too. So we can imagine in a year's time we might have a better platform. So that's one of the things that we have to think about because in an on-site conference, the services provided by the hotel are really important. And there's better hotels and worse hotels.

But essentially, the hotel business has been going on for hundreds of years and people know what to expect. And that's not a new thing. But in the online world, it's a wild west. Everybody's throwing resources at it. Everybody's trying new stuff. And so the things that we can accomplish now, and one of the things is we used a combination of software. We had already used Slack. That's part of the conference for communication across the conference.

We make announcements with that. We have over 30 special interest group channels so that people can, again, it's engage, engage, engage. And that wasn't new. We did that last year. We built on that. It's even better this year. We also used, as I said, Remo, but we also used Zoom for certain kinds of activities. And then we used Sked because that's where people were able to do the rewatch was to use our scheduling software, the SCED. And so what you had was people using four or five different pieces of software. It would be great if we could eliminate a few of those so that you get the same functionality, but you have fewer transitions between, oh, yeah, that's right. I've got to log into this.

I have an account for this. And then I have an account for this. And I have an account for this. So on the one hand, it does give us the ability to do different things. If we were restricted to just Remo and we couldn't use Zoom, which is what our original goal was at the beginning of the conference. We're not going to use Zoom. We're going to do it all in Remo. And then it became obvious that we wanted to have more than eight people in a conversation, which Remo doesn't support.

So we used Zoom for that. And I think if we did it again, we would have used Zoom earlier and more, and we could have done more stuff with Zoom. But we specifically, I mean, that was one of the big drivers is we don't want to add yet another technology, another platform. But no, it gave us the right trade-offs of what we wanted, so we added that. And if we if we could going forward reduce the number of different pieces of software the number of different logins for for users that's great on the other hand we don't want to give up something like the zoom functionality just because of that so it's it's that's the challenge for us and you know every day that goes by there's more

opportunities more things you can do but you but there's a cost to just staying up on that and investigating, you know, I already have some demos set up for people, you know, wanting to show me conference software. There's a ton of it out there. And, you know, a lot of it has some cool bells and whistles in a certain area. What we have to figure out is, does that map well to what exactly we're trying to, trying to make happen? Yeah. Hopefully you've got, like you were saying, at least six months to see where this all develops before you have to make any kind of real decision at all for next year. Well, I personally need to make a decision about C++ now.

C++ now, yeah. Oh, that's true. Probably in the December time frame. And that's going to be a tough decision because it's very likely that we won't have much of a, we probably can't have a physical one by then, which means this year we cancel it. There wasn't any time to switch to virtual. Sorry, switch to online at that time. But

certainly there's time to do that. But C++ Now is more than any other conference, is about the engagement. It is about the conversations that go on in the room. And so, Remo doesn't map nearly as well to that sort of thing. Of course, it's a smaller conference. Maybe we could do it entirely in Zoom. Maybe. I don't know if the keynotes work as well for that, but the breakout sessions could fit.

I mean, these are the questions we've got to deal with, right? Yeah. But the experience we got at CppCon is not going to make that harder. It's going to make that easier. We've learned some things, know more about what's possible and what works for people. And I am pleased that we've gotten good response. And some of it was more like, wow, it was much better than I expected.

Which is good to hear. It's better to hear that than to hear, yeah, it was just as bad as I thought it would be. You don't want to hear that. So it may be that there is a low bar because people didn't expect much of virtual. But people were pleased. Quick to point out, yeah,

there was this kind of one little limitation of Remo or there's this other thing. But I think people felt like it was a conference. It was worth the time investment to put in. And, of course, the financial investment is much lower. We didn't charge as much. But more importantly, you didn't stay at the Gaylord for a week. You didn't fly to Denver, which is not as big a deal for some of us, Jason. I actually spent a fair bit of money in Lyft last year because my wife and I just had one car.

So I left her with the car and it cost me, you know, a couple hundred dollars in Lyft fees to get out there last week. Well, I'm sure those people who flew in from europe really feel sorry well particularly those who stayed not in the gate lord last year and were walking up and down the hill yeah yeah right yeah right today sponsors the pvs studio team the company develops the pvs studio static code analyzer designed to detect errors in the code of programs written in c c++ c sharp and java recently the team has released a new analyzer designed to detect errors in the code of programs written in C, C++, C Sharp, and Java. Recently, the team has released a new analyzer version. In addition to working under Windows, the C Sharp part of the analyzer can also operate under Linux and macOS. However, for C++ programmers, it will be much more interesting to find out that now you can experiment with the analyzer in online mode on the godbolt.org website. The project is called Compiler Explorer and lets you easily try various compilers and code analyzers. This is an indispensable tool for studying the capabilities

of compilers. Besides that, it's a handy assistant when it comes to demonstration of code examples. You'll find all the links in the description of this episode. So John, one thing I had a question about was, you know, at in-person CPV cons, you're always the busiest person, you know, working with the hotel, making sure everything's running smoothly. Were you able to relax a bit more this past week and actually attend more of the talks? I did not attend more of the talks. That much is true. It was way more stressful in some ways because it was so new it was like you know but but by the end of the week things were running so smoothly you know we had scheduled organizers

meeting at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day one of the things that we learned is you have to do everything twice because you have two different sets of of people because of time zones right so uh we've had lightning talks early and lightning talks late. The main, we really compressed the main program was within a six-hour window, actually a five and a half hour window. And that is so different from, you know, you guys have been to CPP Con, I start you at eight o'clock in the morning and I keep going until 10 o'clock at night, right? And the reason is, hey, got you here. Let's pram as much stuff in there.

Let's give you your money's worth, right? But online, it was a different situation where, you know, some people are starting their day and ending their day at very different times. And so the way we did it was, ironically enough, it actually works pretty good for the Denver time zone because we started the sessions at 9 o'clock in Aurora. That wasn't really to make it convenient for Aurora. It's just that if you go too much earlier, it's a problem on the West Coast because people are still trying to sleep. And then we ended at 2.30. And the reason is if you go much later, it's hard for people in Europe. Already, we were completely in even hours. And as Jason said, there were some people who worked all day and then did

the conference in the evening. But at least it's not sleeping hours. So it did cut into their social. There's no question. It's harder from a family point of view for them to be online all night. But at least we kept it pretty much so that people weren't giving up their sleep patterns unless you happen to be from asia so our friends in australia and asia yeah it kind of really sucked for them i talked to a couple kiwis who were from new zealand right yeah but um you know it was still an easy decision to do that just because they're not really well represented they don't you know from a numeric point of view uh you know it sucks to be them but you know it wasn't personal it's just that their numbers you know we we are catering to a u.s and european crowd From a numeric point of view, it sucks to be them, but it wasn't personal. It's just that their numbers, we are catering to a U.S. and European crowd because that's who comes to the conference.

And with the time shifting, that was one of the reasons why we made it possible so that you could immediately re-watch the videos. Because if you had to be totally time shifted, you could still attend the conference and there was less opportunities for engagement because people weren't awake. But at least that was an option for you. I did chat with one New Zealander who was up every day at 2 a.m. and going to bed at 7 in his time zone so that he could come to the conference. Right. And, you know, if we had an on-site conference, if they flew there, then they would be dealing with jet lag, but they'd be doing essentially the same thing. Right.

So, you know. But anyway, what I was going to say is that by the end of the conference, those meetings, those organizer meetings at the beginning and the end of the day were getting pretty short. They're just, things were running pretty smoothly. And I was really, really pleased about that. Kind of a, don't jinx it sort of thing. It's like, well, I don't want to get too confident here.

But the volunteers came through in a big way for us. We really ask a lot more for the volunteers. You know, because of the fact that we have a professional, when we do on-site, we have professional AV, we have professional recording. So the jobs of the volunteers are, you know, help the speaker get started, monitor the room, close the doors, do the timer, whatever they're doing.

But it's not a huge responsibility. This time we had, you know, starting basically three weeks out, or two full weeks before the conference, we were doing training on all the volunteers. This is the software you need to do. This is how to use StreamYard. This is how to use Remo. This is all the different options. This is what you do if the speaker wants to have a session pre-recorded. We had a few of those, mostly because people had bad internet connectivity. So it was better to record it locally and just stream it than to have them try to do it live. Almost everybody was live, but there were a few of those.

So then the next step is a week before the conference, we actually did the entire conference in a sense. Because we did dry runs. If you were speaking on Tuesday, we asked you to do a dry run the previous Tuesday at exactly the same time. That was really the best way to schedule it with all the volunteers and everyone. Now, of course, some people couldn't. It's like, well, I'm speaking on Tuesday, but the week before I have something else on Tuesday I can't do. So we had exceptions, of course, but essentially that's how we did it. That was the key that made it run smoothly because all the speakers and all the volunteers, and we buddied up the speakers and volunteers.

So it wasn't just that you worked with a volunteer in your dry run and then a different volunteer in the talk. No, you had a particular volunteer you worked with. You figured out how you wanted to handle questions because every speaker has a different way of wanting to do the Q&A. Some leave it to the end. Some wanted to read the questions directly in Remo. Some wanted the questions copied and pasted into StreamYard.

There's all sorts of different ways to do it. So that was the key. We essentially, as I say, started two weeks early training the volunteers. Then the next week we trained the speakers by having them do a dry run with their volunteers. So there were, of course, glitches and hiccups. Those things happen. We expected that. But in general, it ran very smoothly.

And I'm just super proud of the volunteers. So I actually, I saw you'd sent me some questions you might ask me. And one of the questions was, you know, how do you run a conference? And I'll tell you right now, I'm sure this will all the listeners. Step one, attract the best speakers in whatever your topic is. In our case, of course, C++. Attract the world the best speakers in whatever your topic is in our case of course c++ attract the world's best speakers step one and don't pay them step two attract a group of volunteers that are really excited about the topic that have a great attitude that want to make attendees happy that are willing to work hard and they are very creative and innovative at solving problems, and don't pay them. Step three, profit.

So that's the secret. Anybody can rent a car. I skipped a few steps about really scary contracts you have to sign with venues and things like that. But other than that, yeah, really ask a lot more of the volunteers than they really came through. So that was delightful. And it did make my job way easier. than that yeah really ask a lot more of the volunteers and they really came through so that was that was delightful and it did make my job way easier although i i think it's i mean you you said that you know step one step two profit uh cpp con is not an actual for-profit venture

though right yeah that's obviously a joke yeah yeah yeah maybe not obviously a joke because all of our listeners here might be like, what the heck? You're just exploiting a bunch of people to make money. So I just wanted to make sure that was clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, I do want to – so there's a couple of reasons to stay in the black and stay strongly in the black. And one is that every once in a while people will come up with an idea. And it's like, yeah, let's try that.

It might lose some money. We don't't know it depends on how popular it is this is kind of the case every time we have a field trip some of the field trips have actually made a lot of money relative to the cost of the field trip because they were really popular and some of them weren't as popular and you end up paying for buses and things like that and we lost money but we don't have to say no, because if we're in the black, we can take some risks. And it's just a lot more fun to run any event at all if somebody comes up with an idea and you can say yes to it, as opposed to saying, yeah, that might lose money and we just can't afford to do that. So that's part of it. But the other part of it is the foundation actually uses the money we raise very effectively. One of the challenges that the ISO committee has is that the ISO rules forbid

them for charging money to attend a committee, to attend committee meetings. And that works fine for standard committee meetings that are made up of 15 or 20 people showing up because you just find a company that's willing to host a meeting like that. And some of them wouldn't even notice. That month's budget would be no higher than any other month. It's just in the noise, right? But when you have a committee meeting like we're doing where we're getting over 200 people show up, and we can't charge, but they still expect to have pastries at break time,

and they have to have AV set up, and having a company host that, hard to find a company willing to do that. And one of the things that, that, that Herb and the, the conveners of the, of the committee are doing is they're helping them out financially with money that we've raised at the conference. Okay. And I'm very happy that they're doing that. So it feeds back into the community. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know into the community. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, the fact that it's a nonprofit is, you know, that does make a difference in a sense.

And there are breaks we get. You know, when we license software like we SCED, we get the nonprofit on SCED and things like that, which that helps a little bit. But, yeah, and so I really am focused on making profit in the sense that I want to stay in the black. I want to turn money over to the Standards Foundation that owns CppCon because I know they're going to spend it really well. So I'm very much about saving money. There's no question about that.

But on the other hand, the mission of the foundation is to promote quality C++. That's why the videos are free. That's why we try to have as many tracks as possible. That's why we try to get as many people to attend, whether they're attending on-site or now the option of attending online. We're trying to expand our reach as much as possible because we want people writing good C++ code. That's what the foundation is set up to do. And that's the mission. And that's why I want to raise money for that.

So we talked with some of the Microsoft presenters earlier in the week about some of their announcements. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about any of the other kind of big news that was made this week in some of the, you know, keynotes and everything that you may have attended. I think the Microsoft announcement, I was keenly aware of that because for several months, I was being told by people at Microsoft, including Herb, who happens to work at Microsoft, that Microsoft had plans to make big announcements. And we could not cancel the conference because Microsoft's corporate plan is announce these things at CppCon. And, you know, this is really one of the goals that I had for the conference way back when we started it. I said, if this conference is successful, it's going to become on the corporate schedule for people in our space.

This is when announcements will happen. It's not necessarily that they'll try to make their products ship for CppCon. I don't know if they'll do that. But major announcements, you know, this is the calendar. This is the venue. We're going to have the attention of the world focused right here. So if we have an announcement, now's the time to make it. And I was absolutely, I mean, it didn't make any less stress to know that people were counting on it for that reason. But as I said, that was one of the goals for CppCon was it should be the place for major announcements. We want this to be the platform. And I think we've

demonstrated that there's a certain, we've had some success in that. Yeah, definitely. One of the tools that you've mentioned several times, and I heard people mention even during the conference, but I had never heard of before, is StreamYard. And it kind of sounds like that's the magic glue that let the volunteer start and stop the conference, the speakers talks and do the interviews and that kind of thing. How did that, is that? So, um, that's not, that's not what gave the volunteers the ability. The reason we used StreamYard was because, um, Remo has very crude ability to, to, to juggle multiple views at a time. Right. And so if, you know, I don't, I don't know exactly how this video goes out from what you guys are producing, but I'm seeing the two of you side by side about the same size. Now, if one of you was a presenter and the other one was a slide deck, I would rather have the

slide deck much larger. Right. And Remo doesn't have any way of dealing with that. It would do essentially what I'm seeing here, which is two equal sized windows. And that's not what people want. They want to see that they do want to see the presenter. They want to see the expressions. They want to see that, but they want to see that a lot less than they want to see the code. And what StreamYard does is it allows you to create a number of different scenarios

of, I want a whole bunch of, you know, it's a panel. I want a whole bunch of equally sized windows, one for every person. Or you can switch it over and say, no, I want to have one big window that I'm going to put the desktop in. And then I could have one or two people on the side. And so there's software like OBS. I'm not really sure if I've even got the initials right. And I don't know what it stands for. But that's really powerful, and you can just go to town and do anything you want. StreamYard is this interesting halfway point where it's got a lot of built-in things that make a lot of sense and are really useful, and it's really easy to use. So the OBS is kind of like C++. You can do anything you want with it, whereas the StreamYard is like Python, where you can't get quite as

nitty-gritty, but it's easier to do the things you usually want to do. I don't know if that's a great analogy, but the idea is, yeah. So what was happening is that the volunteer was working in StreamYard to be able to put the slides up large and the presenters small and do all that

kind of stuff. What StreamYard then does is, and kind of where it gets its name, is it streams then. You can just capture it or you can stream it into YouTube. And that's what we did. We streamed it into a live YouTube channel. And then in Remo, it can stream from YouTube. So that's what we were doing, is we were streaming from StreamYard into YouTube and then from YouTube back into Remo. And as I said, if Remo had better control of how you could display things, where you could go in and say, yeah, I said, if Remo had better control of how you could display things where you could go in and say, yeah, I have two presenters. So I want a little presenter here and a little presenter here and then a big screen for the slides. If we could have done that, we probably wouldn't have used StreamYard.

Again, it's one of these things where to solve the problem we did, we added another layer of software. And then you have the interface issues. So it was, it made it challenging. That's why it took so much for us to do training on the volunteers, to handle all the steps and a little bit more training for the speakers than to just say, oh, go into Remo. And so there's more involved with it. I hope for most of the attendees, they didn't realize there was all that going on. That was kind of the whole point is to, from the attendees point of view, just make it look like, oh, here's the video. That's what we want. The only reason I really noticed is as a streamer, I'm like, wait a minute, how did they get the,

how does the volunteer just pop in and, you know, and answer the questions real quick. Like if I were using OBS, it would not be quite that simple. I know, I know how I could do it on OBS, but it would be a pain. Zoom doesn't allow that kind of thing. What magic did they enchant to make it look this easy here and live like that? And if you watched any of the fireside chat kind of things or whatever with people swapping in and out, it worked well. I'm. The layers of software that you're talking about and all the pieces that it did actually come together. And at some point didn't just collapse like a house of cards, honestly. Yeah.

Well, that's, that was a lot of the stress because I know from having done the onsite, I know what to deal with, what to expect. And, and, you know, I've kind of mentally prepared what would happen if in the middle of a talk speakers, computer just melted down, you know, how would we deal with that? Those kinds of things I've, I've, I've kind of got those fire drills worked out, but to do the online, oh man, the number of things that can go wrong, the ways in which they can go wrong and what would we do about them? There's so many more unknowns. Now I have a lot more confidence. We've got one under the belt. We had just under 1,000. I think the number was 994 attendees. So just under 1,000. That gives you a lot of confidence going forward that we might be able to do these kinds of things on an ongoing basis. And frankly, I think that we didn't market CppCon very much

this year because we didn't know what was going to happen. It's tough to get out there and say, hey, everybody come to Aurora. There's a 20% chance that we're going to hold it there. That's a really tough sell, right? And we didn't know if we were doing it online because there's the possibility that we'll just have to say, look, we're not doing it this year. That was possible, right? So we didn't market it very well. Now, the question is, suppose we market it better. Suppose we said, hey, we're going to do this online. It was really successful last year.

People engaged. Let's do that again. Let's market that. It's inexpensive. It's flexible. Go for it. Could we do more than 1 a thousand attendees and also do a thousand attendees on on-site as well who knows i think we can i have some confidence

and now i have confidence in the technology that we can we can at least i know we can do it on-site i know we can do it online can we do a hybrid there's a lot of questions about how best to to make it work in a hybrid environment how best to get interactivity between the people online. Having people online, talking with people online works really well. Having people on-site, talking with people on-site works really well. Bridging those two is going to be more challenging, but I think to a certain extent it's not really necessary. If we can figure out how to get the online people

having access to talk to speakers in an online way, it's probably not really critical that we strap on-site people into a chair and make them stare into their laptop. If the two communities are somewhat separate, I think that's okay as long as they're engaging with the speakers. We're going to find those things out. So there's still some questions about about what what does it mean to be hybrid and and you know but we've but we've now because of covid this is the silver lining of covid we've now figured out that we can do we can make online work there's a value there it's worth doing uh it's interesting to a lot of people there were just a lot of people as i said who said well this is my first cpp con and couldn't make it otherwise except that it's online.

We just need to put out the call to our listeners to I mean, people have already done this. It's by no means new. This has been happening for a couple of decades now. But some sort of virtual avatar that's roving the halls of CppCon, if you just have a couple dozen of them, no big deal. And then online viewers can hop into one if it's available, rove around, chat with the people in the hallway track. It all seems perfectly reasonable to me. So this is actually an idea that I had pre-COVID. I wanted to do this. I was actually hoping that Channel 9, you know, Channel 9 is Microsoft's internal developer communication thing.

I shouldn't say internal. It's's external but it's developer focused um i was hoping they would do it but but um what i wanted to do imagine that we kind of in the hallway we build a studio if you will with a plexiglass window so you can actually see people walking in the hallway, but you can do interviews with that as a background. And now with an online stream, it makes it all the more compelling. So it would be great to have, and if you knew a couple of people who worked on a podcast, they might be great for interviewing people right at the conference, both speakers talking about the talks they're about to give or have given and what kind of response they got, as well as kind of, you know, man on the street things where, oh, here's someone who's attending for the first time or here's someone who's attended many times and ask how this conference is different. And that's the kind of thing that would be really, I think, compelling for people online to get more of a feel for what's going on on site. So that's like, as I said, that was something that I had wanted to do basically to not, not for people attending online because I wasn't doing that, but mostly kind of to let

people who were in the community who couldn't come get a glimpse of what we were doing in the same way that people were tweeting out photos or whatever, you know, this is what's going on at the conference. That's what I was thinking about. But now I'm thinking more about it. No, we could, we could really beef that up beef that up and and have more in-depth interviews and more interesting kinds of things for people online and then of course because it's it is physically there we put some chairs in front of it and we let people who are on site also watch the same thing so um this is

you know now that i got you on the spot this is uh an offer you guys willing to uh certainly worth thinking about uh there you go okay but uh yeah i've also now been thinking about yeah um kevin i don't know if you're familiar but kevin carpenter has been doing interviews of of speakers that we run right before the conference some video interviews and uh i've talked to him about maybe doing kind of a roving kind of thing where he would go around and capture interviews and things like that. We'd kind of probably splice them together rather than do the raw, splice those together, and then, again, show those to the online community. So those are the kinds of things that I'm thinking about

that you could do with a hybrid. That's something that can only be done with a hybrid right because you don't have an audience for it if you're doing totally on site and if you don't have anybody on site you can't really do roving interviews very well so there's so many things to think about and to try and you know cpp con has done a lot of things that didn't work out because we because we experiment we're willing to try these things i don't know i did want to mention there were some pretty cool things that were done this year that I think could only really be done online.

We were talking about the Fireside Chat a moment ago. I really liked how during the Fireside Chat, Herb replaced his video stream with the Fireplace. First Fireside Chat where we actually had a fireside. That was really nice, especially when the fireplace was talking. that gave a really nice effect um and also i think uh david sankle who've had on the show before he gave a great talk where uh his kids and i think he had like five or six kids uh were the audience for his talk and they would actually answer questions

during the talk that was really neat were there any other kind of cases like that where they did something that just couldn't be done in person that you're aware of? Yeah, most of the people who were doing recorded, pre-recorded talks was, as I said, just to work around some technical issues. But David, obviously, you know, he was more, I mean, you know. It's more creative. He was very creative. I'm not really sure that our future is to become a film festival. But I can – and I'm thinking of one particular person who's been on your show and also on ours who splices in a lot of video as part of his talk. Oh, yeah. I can imagine people kind of starting to think about, wait a minute, what kind of presentation could I do? I mean, you know, Jason does the, in weekly, you do a lot of video stuff

that would be challenging to do live because, you know, you do the speed up things. Okay, I'm going to type in a lot of code here, which is going to be fascinating for you to sit here and watch. So you show it fast speed and it's better actually showing it go up than to just show it pop up. No, no. I mean, it's very effective. It really works. Imagine that you start to think about, okay, suppose I had an hour and instead of giving

a talk, I'm actually creating a film. I shouldn't use the word film, you know, but I'm creating a video and how best can I make that happen? You know, when can I cut into a talking head, maybe of myself, explaining a concept where before we get to the code, you want to listen to what I'm saying and don't be distracted by reading code

or anything like that. But then I splice in the actual code, it's animated, and we do zooms and blow up and we splice in Compiler Explorer. Now, there's a lot of work going on here and it's way more work than to just say, you know, I've got this slide deck

and I'm just going to stand there and produce it. But I'm certain that there are people, just like David Sanko, put a little bit of effort into it because they enjoy doing it. It's creative, it's fun, and it will really be effective. So online does, you know,

the ability to do a pre-recorded talk is likely to unlock a lot of creativity. There's going to be people who will, I wouldn't be surprised if we see, you know, puppets. You know. And, you know, like any other experiment, like I said, some of the things we've done at CPP Co. have failed. If you're not failing, you're not experimenting, right? So there's going to be people who are going to try some things and some of them won't work. But some of them could be very effective at thinking about,

hey, look, there's a bunch of ideas we want to get across. And one way of doing that is for me to stand here and look at a slideshow with a bunch of code on it. But there's other ways to do it too that might even be more effective. And so, you know, one of the things, if and when we do the hybrid, you know, nothing is committed to yet, but in my heart, I'm pretty committed. We will almost certainly have a track

that's for online presenters. In other words, it will be all, it will be for the people who can't attend because they're not just attendees who want to be in the audience. It's also people who can't attend because they're not just attendees who want to be in the audience. It's also people who would like to present who can't travel or can't get away for

a week or whatever the reason. We will almost certainly have at least one track, maybe a couple tracks that are for the virtual ticket only. Virtual ticket only or do you imagine that there would be a room at the conference center playing it? I'm imagining that I want to charge you for that ticket.

So I don't want to give it away to the people who are attending. I got plenty of things. If you're attending on site, I'll keep you busy. If you want to see the CppCon film festival of pre-recorded videos, you need to buy the virtual ticket too. Excuse me, the online ticket buy the virtual ticket too. Excuse me, the online ticket. I don't know. It's certainly, it's certainly, you know, we haven't committed to anything. But that's my thinking right now, is that there will probably be at least one track to support speakers who would like to present, have something interesting to say,

but actually being on site for one reason or another is too big an obstacle. And I want to capture that. That's part of our community. And I want to capture that too and share that. Do you know if any of the speakers that we had this year would have been unable to attend otherwise? Honestly, no one would have come in person. I know for certain because most of them would have been able to attend because they submitted, and on the submission we gave them the option.

And this was kind of a retrofit. When we originally announced, we just assumed we'd be on site. But it was actually Claire, who I think has been on your show, who said, well, can I make a submission in case it's online? And I said, sure, why not? So we actually went back and changed the submission form to add that question. And then probably 98% of the people who submitted said online or on-site, either one. So most of them could have been there.

But Claire was one who she had told me before she had reasons that she wasn't going to be able to travel i mean she's been there before it's not like she could never be but this year she knew she couldn't make it but she was able to attend online and she gave a talk online a um and gave a lightning talk too it was i did i didn't see her talk but i I saw her lightning talk, which is pretty cool. So, yeah. But we didn't really, again, because a lot of this was last minute. So I think if we announced earlier and said, by the way, we have a track for people who can't make it on site, but we would like to see you present.

I think we'll get more submissions of that and we'll see more. We'll unlock that content because you know there are people who i've dealt with um through boost and so other things who are you know very much part of our our community but they never show up at conferences because of fill in the blank reason and i would love to hear them present and and be you know engaged with them in that way so this is an opportunity for that. Okay. Well, last question we have, I think, is for all the people who weren't able to attend the conference online this year and are looking forward to the YouTube talks. When might those be available? Do you know? Well, with Bash Films, we have the – actually, it's part of the contract that they're always up at least in a month.

Bash usually beats that sometimes quite a bit. It depends on how many other events they have afterwards that affects that. But anyway, we don't have that guaranteed this year because we're going through Jim Roper and we just didn't stress getting the videos

up because we were more stressed about all the things he was having to do to record them. It's way more challenging to capture them. But on the other hand, Jim had them up in great time. Jim is the guy that's worked with ACCU even in the on-site version. So he's very much involved with the conference. And because of that association, Phil had used him for C++ on C. So he has now also done an entirely online conference

and this would be his second entirely online conference. So we'll get the videos up pretty damn soon. Not necessarily all of them, but they will start appearing. And so we're looking at the same approximate time frame. Okay. By a month or two months, I think we'll have them all up. Yeah. You know, the recorded video will probably not be up to the Bash film standard because, you know, it relies on the lighting of the speaker. And if it's not well lit, it relies on the audio and video quality

of their hardware and all sorts of things so um jim is pretty good at fixing audio and doing all the things so we you know it's going to be it's going to be certainly watchable uh but it may not be the quality that we would normally have for what you normally expect at CPP con videos. Cause bash does a great job of making sure the video quality and audio quality are really good. And, and then they do really good editing. So Jim can do the editing,

but he's, he's starting with, there's less control he has over the audio and video. So I'm not going to be embarrassed by them, but I do want people to know, yeah, it's probably not going to be the bash films standard but I do want people to know, yeah, it's probably not going to be the Bash Films standard that we are used to. But it will still be what you need, which is you get your content.

Right. Right. Okay. Well, it's been great to have you on the show again, John. Thank you so much for hosting a great online conference. You should go get some rest, I think. Yeah, go take a nap. Oh, man. I don't know. Thanks a bunch, guys. Thank you, John. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening in as we chat about C++. We'd love to hear what you think of the podcast. Please let us know if we're discussing the stuff you're interested in, or if you have a suggestion for a topic, we'd love to hear about that too. You can email all your thoughts to feedback at cppcast.com.

We'd also appreciate if you can like CppCast on Facebook and follow CppCast on Twitter. You can also follow me at Rob W. Irving and Jason at Lefticus on Twitter. We'd also like to thank all our patrons who help support the show through Patreon. If you'd like to support us on Patreon, you can do so at patreon.com slash cppcast. And of course, you can find all that info and the show notes on the podcast website at cppcast.com. Theme music for this episode is provided by podcastthemes.com.