CppCast - Meeting C++ 2020

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

Rob and Jason are joined by Jens Weller from Meeting C++. They discuss a blog post on Immediately Invoked Function Expressions, a syntactic sugar library and JeanHeyd Meneid's blog and video about the C++ Community. Then they talk with Jens about the upcoming Meeting C++ conference, on line user groups and job fairs and more. News Coding Cards Technique: Immediately Invoked Function Expression for Metaprogramming SugarPP: syntactic 🍬 for programming in C++ The Community Links Meeting C++ Survey Meeting C++ 2020 Meeting C++ Online Burnout - Jens Weller - Meeting C++ 2019 secret lightning talks 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 268 of CppCast with Jens Vellet, recorded October 7th, 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 syntactic sugar and the C++ community. Then we talk to Jens Velo from Meeting C++. We talk to Jens about the upcoming Meeting C++ conference, online user groups, and more. Welcome to episode 268 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 today? I'm doing all right, Rob. But you know what I just realized? What's that? We would say the C++ podcast originally, right? Now we say the first because CBP chat became a regular podcast but do we know for a fact that there was actually no one before us

doing C++ podcasting? I don't know for certain but I would think someone would have corrected us by now if that were the case I know there's certainly more general programming podcasts that have done episodes on C++, but I think we were the first dedicated to it. Okay. Just I don't know why that just struck me. Okay. Well, at the top of the episode, I'd like to read a piece of feedback.

We got a long email today. I'm going to kind of summarize parts of it. But it's from Harold saying, Hey, Rob and Jason, I'm currently doing C++ for mobile at work and enjoy the cross-platform mobile technology or telephony episode a lot, which we did recently with Dave Hagedorn.

And then he goes on to say, C++ on mobile is interesting and seems to be a difficult topic. The genie people who have been on your show, but now the project is read only and not maintained. There's also Bowden. We did an episode with them a while back, but that also is currently not maintained anymore and its future is uncertain. But he points out that Ginny is not totally abandoned and there is a fork that has been getting some ongoing development. So if you've been interested in any of the episodes we've done where we mentioned Ginny as a cross-platform framework

for C++ on mobile, check out, it's github.com cross-language-cpp Ginny. And they're saying they're a small team, but they're using Ginny in all their projects, and they're trying to work on some of the outstanding PRs that Dropbox never fixed. So yeah, pretty cool that there is

some ongoing investment in that work. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, so he also says, by the way, if you are interested in mobile C++, there's also a mobile dev channel on the CPP language Slack. So definitely go check that out.

Okay. We'd love to hear your thoughts about the show. You can always reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, or email us at feedback at cpcast.com. And don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or subscribe on YouTube. Joining us today is Jens Veller. Jens is the organizer and founder of Meeting C++, doing C++ since 1998. He's an active member of the C++ community from being a moderator at C++.de and organizer of his own C++ user group since 2011 at Dusseldorf. His roots are in the C++ community. Today,

his main work is running Meeting C++ platform, the conference website, social media, and recruiting. His main role has been being a C++ evangelist, and he speaks and travels to other conferences and user groups around the world. Jens, welcome back to the show. Hey, nice to be back. At least in a normal year, you travel and go to all the conferences around the world, huh? Yeah, that part changed a bit.

We'll do that next year again, hopefully. Just out of curiosity, how many plane tickets did you cancel this year? How many had you already bought and then had to cancel? Not a single one. Really? I planned to skip on Aspen, the conference, because last year it was kind of... They've moved in a week earlier, and that's giving me some conflicts.

And I plan to skip that this year and go to other conferences. And I somehow was lazy with booking my planned holiday. And so I didn't invest any time in having to wonder about that. And I was kind of, you know, very early. I had this on the radar when like the first news came in that something's popping up in China. I was, okay, we remember SARS and now we will see if we get lucky again or not. Right. And so I kind of did not from that point on invest in any bookings for travel. Well, that's fortunate.

I definitely was not so lucky, but I just have a bunch of airplane credit. It'll be fine. Yeah, I can't say for the summer, too. Traveling is not so much part of my daily routine anymore as it used to be. Right. Okay, well, Jens, we have a couple news articles to discuss.

Feel free to comment on any of these. And I'll start talking more about meeting C++ this year, okay? Okay. All right. This first one we have is codingcards.org. And this is a cool little website where you can learn some of the new features being added in C++ 20. And it's got a built-in editor for typing in code and you can run it and kind of learn how some of the new features work.

It gives you prompts to do different type of coding examples. And if you can't figure something out on your own, you can get a solution. So I thought this was a pretty neat little tool. Yeah, that was fun. I played with just the first couple of cards. I didn't spend a ton of time on it, but yeah, definitely fun. Interesting.

I didn't see how many there were in total. No, actually. I just got on the first card, but I don't know if it's the first card. Maybe they go randomly. And solved that and looked at the solution. I think it could be improved in a few ways. You don't at the solution. I think it could be improved in a few ways. You don't know the

standard. You don't really have control over some things, but it's a neat idea. Yeah, definitely neat idea. Okay. Next thing we have is a blog from Jonathan Mueller, Foo Nathan.

This is a blog post on immediately invoked function expression for metaprogramming. And it's a concept that I think we've talked about a little bit before on the show, the immediately invoked lambdas. But he kind of came up with a new use for it, which is interesting. I had not seen this uh directly before it is so he's using decal type for the call of immediately invoked lambda to generate a new type effectively so it requires c++ 20s lambdas and unevaluated context um and a little bit of trickery to work around some of like decovel's limitations it's very close to the techniques that hannah uses in um ctre to generate types and after seeing hannah do it and honestly it took me like three times watching her talks to understand what was going on uh then i

tried playing with that and now uh jonathan is like you know those techniques involve like creating a free function that would generate the type back for you you say you don't actually call the function you just pretend like you're going to call the function and say what would be the type of the result of this if i had called this function and jonathan took this to the next uh step and just said well why make a function if the only point is to generate a type for you? We can just now in C++20 slap that into a lambda. That is how I understand this. Yeah.

So the interesting part is his solution only works in C++20. But when I read the blog post, I found it very neat that he also provides a C++17 solution, which basically is a freesending function. And I was not aware about the connection to HANA's work, but that's really nice to know. Yeah. Okay. Next thing we have is a GitHub repository, and this is SugarPPP, which is syntactic sugar

for programming C++. And this is pretty cool. It looks like their goal is to kind of mimic some of the syntax and features of Kotlin, which is a program language we've kind of mentioned a few times before on the show. And it looks like it was pretty successful. I wasn't familiar with this when clause in Kotlin, but it's kind of their version of the switch case,

but maybe a little bit more advanced. Yeah, also related to Rust and functional programming languages pattern matching stuff. Right, which we're hopefully going to get in C++23. How similar is this to the pattern matching proposal? Do you remember? My impression is that it is quite similar. Okay.

What's funny is I was... Go ahead, Jan, sorry. So I looked into that, and it's not for me. I think it's a neat idea, and it's something you can play around with and interesting to implement. I looked under the hood, and I think they should wrap this library in a namespace because it does have some very

obvious names like is not or something in functions and types which is like exposing to the main namespace and this when construct and I've read some of the reddit comments and that's how I kind of the when construct

looks neat and they seem to be using a little bit of variance under the hood maybe probably for this to work but compared to a switch case it does not come for free so you should do some measuring if the overhead is acceptable for you or if you just want to keep the old style until we have pattern matching

in the language. Right right yeah i've been so wanting pattern matching recently and then reading or at least looking over some of the the proposals for it and then we talked about it what last week rob i think we mentioned a little bit last week memory yeah is that last week yeah um and i was been thinking in the back of my head for like the last week, like I'm almost positive that you could write a library that would give you an expressive pattern matching construct currently today. And like C plus plus 20, like I'm almost positive it's possible,

but I hadn't actually sat down to, to try. And then, and then seeing this pop up, I'm like, wow, this just came full circle for me. So I thought our listeners might find it interesting also. But yeah, if you want to do something that can be done in a switch statement, use the switch statement.

That's also not the only feature of this library, just for the record. It's just the main one that people are talking about. Yeah, it's also doing something with ranges here, right? And some IO utilities. I didn't really look at those as much because it was the pattern matching that really jumped out at me. Yeah. Okay, and then the last thing we have

is this blog post and video from Jean-Huidh Benid who we've had on the show before about the C++ community. If you follow C++ on Twitter or on Reddit, you've probably seen links to this. If you haven't already watched the video, I definitely encourage everyone to watch it. You know, on the podcast today, we're three white guys. I'm not sure how much more I want to say about the experience of a black member of our community, other than just to say I'm kind of horrified as to what Johnny has experienced in the C++ community.

You know, obviously we need to be better so that these types of things don't happen. I don't know. Jason, Yan, do you have anything you want to add? Well, as a community organizer, I would like to add a lot more to that, but I will do that on my blog and address some ... It's my point of view from how we can improve things in some things.

I want to thank him for Jean-Pietre for just having the bravery to speak up about this. I think that most of us community organizers are happy to help with that and are happy to improve the community and are willing to listen to you if you reach out to us. And yeah, I'm going to have a follow-up on my blog about this. Sounds good.

That's definitely, I think, important. I want to say something. I don't know if it'll come across well or not because sometimes I feel like I'm a complete moron when it comes to trying to express stuff like this. But I think it's easy, like you said, Rob, for us as three white guys to be like, oh, well, that just happened once. Or, well, I've never seen that happen. So I don't believe there's actually a problem because I've never seen it or I've never experienced it. And even if you want to say, oh, well, that's just the experience of one person.

This doesn't happen to everyone. But I think we've seen in the last six months or so, if you've been paying attention, if you've been reading Twitter, if you've been actually talking to people, that the number of things that you could try to write off as just one person's experience is completely overwhelming. There's no way you can say that's just one person's experience because it's, you know, every minority person that I know in the C++ community or in the world at this point has stories that are coming out that you're like, well, okay well okay well you can't just say it's one person's experience anymore or oh that hasn't happened to me because it's like literally

every minority that i know depend no matter how they are represented as a minority has these stories yes definitely yeah it's valid what he says and also i've you know know from other people having similar experiences in our community, so it's not like one person having a weird experience. No, no. Yeah. Well, I really value Jean-Huid as a member of our community. We've had him on the podcast twice, I think.

I'll have him on again soon. I know he's been doing some interesting things with rewriting Stood Vector. So hopefully we can have him on again soon. I know he's been doing some interesting things with rewriting std vector. So hopefully we can have him on again soon and maybe we'll talk about this in a little more detail with him when we have him on. Okay, so Jens, you are currently running a new survey, I think, right? On the meeting C++ website. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yes. So three years ago, I had the idea for this tool because also kind of three years ago was like when we

had the first surveys coming out which were run by serious organizations. So we do have a severe lack of data on C++ usage in the community which is available to the public. And so I had this idea about this two or three years ago, and last winter during the Christmas break I implemented it. It's not an annual survey, it's a continuous survey, so that your answers get

saved in an aggregate and also as a single data point so that I can later do different aggregates on that and you can compare it. It's a very in-depth tool and other surveys which exist since 2017 are the ICCPP and the DeadBrands survey and I think it's important to kind of say that it's really good that all those three surveys exist so we can compare data points. On the other hand, my survey tool is continuous. You get, with every question you answer, the next question and you get the result of the previous question and every question you get is random.

So I have over 70 questions and I'm going to add more questions. One question I currently don't have is, what standard features of C++20 do you use? But I want to add that soon. So that's interesting. So you're saying you're going to run this on an ongoing basis? You're never going to have a final, like, surveys over, here's the blog post of results type of thing?

Yes, but I still can say this is a good understanding. I do save your vote with a date connected to it, so I can extract a quarter, a year. I can say who voted on that day if I wanted to. So the survey tool offers two modes. You don't need to log in But then comes a capture and I also gave CppCast a link So I guess it's in the show notes If you click on it and you see the capture because you're not logged into my site you either can create an account or you

Can solve the capture? But extra for CppCast I created a bypass. If you enter CPP cost with capital C's, then the captcha is also solved. I think the bots are not listening here. So the survey kind of gives you an ID, but this is like a random ID, and this is how the tool is based on that. Okay. What are you hoping to learn from the survey? I think you mentioned that there's

some other surveys done by JetBrains. Are you trying to glean any additional information from yours compared to what they have derived? Well, first I think that all organizations which are prone to a bias of their own.

So JetBra brains ask certain questions and maybe they avoid certain other questions because that's not interesting to them. The same is true for ISOCPP and the same is probably true for myself. I'm trying to avoid that, but I noticed that one of the bias I am exposed to without noticing myself is just the community

and the part of folks which I reach which are actually willing to do the survey. And so right now I like I have a question about your on which continent do you live because which country would be just too much to select but so right now it's a bit biased towards Europe and in my own survey. And on the other hand, I really found it interesting to ask for C++ feature usage, like language feature or library feature of a specific standard, and just see what features actually are getting used out there. And we never had data on that. The other part is that we don't have any knowledge about standard adoption.

Like from 2011, when the standard was also 2014, we don't know anything about that time frame. And from 2014 to 2017, I'm not aware about a dataset. It might exist, but as I said, I think the JetBrains survey started in 2017 asking questions like, which standard do you use? And so I think a lot of usage of this will turn out to be interesting when we are more like moving on into this decade and can see like how's adoption for C++ 20 for 23 compared to to the data which we have since 17. So have you learned anything interesting so far about the adoption of C++ 20 for example? I think it's too early for 20. I found it interesting that with 11, the most used feature is unique pointer, and the second most popular feature in C++11 is shared pointer for the library features.

That makes me a little sad, honestly. Yeah, but it's also kind of telling. You finally have a way to deal with heap allocations and the standard, and folks make use of it. It's kind of natural, but it's also kind of nice to see that data and to know what is used and I don't have the question for C++20 yet. I have a question on how people plan or have adopted in the last year on standard usage and surely let me share my screen with you then I can show that to you.

That's interesting. We've never had a guest share the screen before. I prepared for this but I have to find... There's over 70 questions that's now that I... We'll have to get some narration here. Will you be upgrading to a new

C++ standard in the last or in the coming year? Okay, so you see there's a lot of folks seemingly planning to upgrade to C++ 20 when it's out, as you can see here. That's great. There's some people, you know, have upgraded to C++ 11. There are some folks which plan to, and I want to say to those move to 14. 11 is like a standard which you should only upgrade to if that's like your only option because you are running a weird compiler or some setting which prevents that. Or go for 17 if you can.

You know, there's a lot of activity in 17 as you see. And for 20, there's a small amount of folks which have upgraded to and of course it's difficult to say if it's like the whole code base or if they just have like one trial running with that. And it seems to be a popular way to do that in the future, definitely. And as I look at the answers over time, we will be able to compare that in one year, like do the people which have planned to upgrade, have they actually upgraded? And we can probably compare this in the future, do the people which have planned to upgrade, have they actually upgraded? And we can probably compare this in the future, you know, how many people did upgrade in this year compared to that year. So over time, I think we will have really, really interesting data points, which

will be just available through having this as a continuous survey. Yeah, that's something I've said a few times as a best practice is skip C++11. If you don't upgrade to C++11 right now, I totally agree with that. I mean, even people that I know who work in an extremely limited compiler-supported environment, they want to have the oldest support possible for their minimal set of hardware on embedded ARM platforms, who are like, oh, yeah, you're right. We can enable the C++14 flag. And then they skipped 11 just like that. For them, it was easy even, even though they were the most restricted client I've worked

with in a while. That's good. Any other kind of really interesting takeaways as far as other C++ features being used that you didn't expect to see? There's 70 questions, so there's a lot of things which is interesting, and I like the time to go through it and to pick out. I think the question which is updating is really interesting. The feature usage is interesting.

I have multiple questions on the standard usage, which is interesting. There's the question on build systems, where CMake wins the day. I have some questions on conferences, which are interesting for conference organizers like me, probably, and lots of other things in the survey. I'll definitely encourage listeners to click on that link. That'll be in the show notes to go fill out the survey themselves. So you have a couple other new things going on. Do you want to tell us about meeting C++ online? Sure.

So as things moved online in C++ 2020 this year, I thought about what you do with that because I wanted to have some experience for me in C++ 2020 when we have this happening as an online event, but I also thought that this is a new format and maybe you want to embrace that as a community and use it as a chance to reach other folks which otherwise not would be able to participate in a live setting where you can communicate with folks and just watch the video otherwise or listen to the CppCast for example and so it's a lineup of different events once a month I host a

user group in rainbow platform which also CppCon uses but I also decided that from from the platforms I've seen it's the best option to run online events and and then this user group the next meeting is next week on the 15th with Inbal Levy giving a talk on meta programming and C++20 and I'm looking forward to that talk and it's for me kind of awesome now the experience that I finally have the time to watch talks because there's so many good videos out there and either I can't decide what to watch or I'm just right now really busy with this, for example. This is mostly running on software which I've written in the last weeks.

But there's also an online conference. The first online conference was on September 24th. The next one is on December 3rd and we were going to have Herb as a guest. And on the September version, we had seven great talks, which are partially on YouTube already. I'm planning to publish them in the next weeks. And so I plan to kind of put the online conference for September 3rd online tomorrow, you already can submit talks right now that works, that's linked. And I hope I have the time to announce it tomorrow that everything in detail is there.

And then I hope to basically run this until the end of the month I think is the deadline for submitting talks maybe earlier I have to decide I have to see how I want to do it but I think it's like the end of the month which makes sense and then on December 3rd if you as an online community or as a C++ community wants to join that there is a free sponsored ticket available and then of course there will be tickets available which support my work and certainly work for the C++ community if you want to support that. Sounds great. And yeah, then I've been thinking about other formats which you

can do online because you're just living in a new world now. Yeah. Things are possible. So I thought about opening the idea of having a job fair and so on October 20th there will be a job fair and for that I'm still looking for employers which want to participate in that so I have an answer this week and then you saw it's everything I think you need to know it's a new news for that and I guess you're gonna be doing the job fair using Remo as well yes okay find that interesting I haven't I went I went doing the job fair using Remo as well? Yes. Okay. I find that interesting. I went to several job fairs in university, and then right after graduation, I went to a job fair.

I don't recall seeing any advertised in the last while, decade or so. But it seems like in Remo, particularly if you've got employers who are looking for remote employees, which at this point, effectively, everyone's remote. Right. It seems like a great way to get one on one talks and that kind of job fair environment. Like, oh, come on, let's go into a private room. We'll have a quick chat about your CV and see if you're a good fit for our company or whatever. Seems like a pretty interesting concept to me. I'm curious, are you getting a good response so far? You said you're still looking for employers who are interested. I want to put some weight on that statement.

I'm still looking. Of course, it's not the best time. There's a lot of companies in the automotive sector right now not hiring for some reason. And some other companies in C++ right now have a good time like gaming companies trading companies yeah and they're hiring and then there's some general folks which are like always hiring because their business is not like connected to the economic cycle that much um and i just want to give it a try and employers are free to conduct the interviews there. I probably will have a forum online where you basically can select the employers which are

supporting MEANING C++ and upload your CV and that gets sent to them and they just can contact you because I kind of want to make something available on the website for everyone who misses this time frame, who couldn't come to Remo and also just offer some spot for maybe, you know, there's the tables which have a name and it's an employer name and you can go there and talk to them, get to know them as a company. And then there might be other tables where no employer is sitting and you just can chat to other job searching folks. It will be kind of an open format and I want to see how things play out for that.

Sure. Are you putting any restrictions at all on the types of employers you want? Do they have to offer remote work as an option or is it just anyone looking for C++ developers? How about it? Yeah, no, it's not a requirement that you're supporting remote work. I mean, it would be great if you do that, but if you're looking for to employ people in C++ and you want to have contacts in that area, then

please contact me. That's like a new format and we're giving it a try. Also, of course, if you're looking for a job and you can attend in that time frame, come by, create a network, talk to people, and I hope to have some folks which might be looking for a C++ job right now with that. So you want submissions as soon as possible, of course, for employers, but do you have a deadline currently?

Yeah, the deadline is next week, I think, October 15th for me to make the decision if we have enough interest in that from employers at the conference to basically host the event because I also need to invest time in it. Right. So this will air on October 9th, approximately. So as soon as you hear this, if you're interested, you should go to meetingc++, 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. We want to go back to the C++, meaning C++ online a little bit. You said you've already been doing that. I think you said there was one a week or two ago. How did it go?

I think it was really a short time frame to attend this. It's a new concept. It went very well. It was a very good event. I hope for a bit more attendance next time i think it's

not a lot of the of the community knew about that um so it really was a nice event everyone who was there enjoyed it very much um one thing i learned from it is that the next time i want to make the uh the breaks longer so that people have more time to chat and also offer like a track where you basically can go to talk and you saw the talk and not want to see the next one. There's a hallway track and otherwise it was just for me also a nice experience just to be able to watch a whole day just talks and go into the night with it and give some some folks which did not get there that's the other that's the other side of things

um me c plus plus in the main track this year has only 11 slots and it's a main track not everybody is suited for the main track to speak um so new people which haven't spoken prior to that it's a difficult selection and also basically the community has its selection on this main track and it's kind of clear which people should speak on that. Makes it difficult to choose. On the other side, not a lot of people submitted this year for the reason that it's 2020 and that was still unclear at that point if it's an online conference and if that is a thing, what is an online conference, which is, I think, clearer enough how to speak online and nobody knew that in June and May so some

people didn't submit for that reason because they may also just have been busy with the virus and so I wanted to give some of my speakers who had submitted a chance to give their talks because for some reason I know that I have to plan for Berlin to only be a single track. And so I was looking for finding a way to give some more folks the chance to get those talks into reality and into the community that those people can be listened to. A comment that I've been thinking about since attending CBPCon, I personally did not submit any talks to any conferences this year. Like you were saying, Jens, you didn't get a ton of submissions because the idea of presenting to remote rooms seemed a bit daunting.

Like I can't get the same kind of feedback and interaction that I like to get. But I did notice some of the CBP con presenters really tried to take that as a challenge and had like, I think it was Phil Nash had like a live word cloud link that people could type in their answers into and it would build a word cloud of what people's responses were. Interesting. And then I saw, I think a couple of people did like, you know, raise your hand or comment in the box real quick and I'll try and they've switched over to the, uh, to the comment field. And now I kind of wish, maybe not 100% yet, but I kind of wish that I had taken that as a challenge instead of just skipping the conference year.

So just a thought maybe for people who are still thinking about the things that are upcoming this year or the Meeting C++ online events that you're talking about, Jens, just maybe comment for other people who have had the same thoughts that I did. I'm happy to take your submission if you want to have a comment this year, December 3rd. But yeah, I agree with that.

And I think it's also kind of a good thing that some people decide not to speak in a year. And I think that's okay. Yeah. Because I think we do have a problem in our community that some people speak every year and for some people that's their job and that's

fine and they're totally okay with that and they're happy with that and for some other people I see like often people like you know asking them for talks or just I don't want people you know be pushed by the community into burnout and into oversubscription to just do this and so I was happy about

everyone that submitted I was understanding that there's a problem for for some folks and especially for diverse folks to submit in such a year to commit to a talk when you already have to handle so much everything and else and you don't know how things are going to turn out. And if you want to give it a try, it's also like a big chance, you know, to start online speaking. And I understand that not every speaker which is used to stand on a stage, and I mostly hear those comments from the professional speakers which are used to do our big talks and i understand them but on the other hand i have to say to the rest of the community maybe that's your chance

to start speaking and right at the end we're probably going to have people which find it weird to give their talks not online they're like standing on a stage and talking to into a room with real people and some some other folks might only be able to give their talks that way because they have visa issues and are not able to visit our conferences in the U.S. or in Europe. That's a really good point. So it's a big opportunity which we have as a community, I think. You kind of mentioned speakers having burnout a moment ago,

and you actually gave a talk about burnout last year right do you want to tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that um yeah so that's an ongoing problem for me which i probably also don't really get rid of i have a name for it it's phoenix cycle you know kind of every year you burn out a bit because i organize a conference and that's my existence so a lot of my work is for that. And I decided just to talk about that because also through dealing with it I got into photography, into hiking and I got a lot of pictures which were expressive and could support such a talk. And I kind of see that a lot of people in our community have similar problems. And I was like, I thought it's like this part of my conference in Berlin

is the part where people could do such talks. And I wanted to use that to say, hey, it's okay to have that problem. It's okay to say no. It's okay to step back for a year or as much time you need so it's definitely also important to make people aware that self-awareness and self-care is a thing and that should take a serious part of their lives seriousness and yeah that's that was my motivation to do the talk yeah that's definitely very important that was something everyone should be aware of and have a strategy for dealing with it.

So on the topic of meeting C++, you said that is your life, your cycle, your Phoenix-Burn cycle, which I can totally see that because you invest so much of it into it. And then take a holiday afterward, generally, as we see on Twitter every year when you show us where you happen to be shortly after meeting C++. What is the status of meeting C++ this year looking like? It's a hybrid conference is still the plan? Is that correct? Yes. So, yeah, let me quickly talk about this year's conference. So from today's standpoint, it is a hybrid conference.

So the tickets for Berlin are available since last week. And you can get your ticket to be in Berlin. Also, I just want to say that there's a hack. If you could get your employer to spend money on that ticket, you could attend the conference still online and just be in Berlin or book a hotel it's just you know I don't want to promote that but just saying it's maybe you know I've seen that for a lot of other people which you know get the online tickets which are a bit cheaper of course I have

problems to then actually attend the conference because I'm like you you want to join the meeting or you should join the meeting was as important and they're distracted from work so if you want to take the risk and come to Berlin, you still can attend online. So if you come to Berlin and then the setup is nice and you want to attend, that's fine. But if you want to come to Berlin, it's your choice if you then go to the conference itself and attend there partially or fully or attend from your room because maybe you don't think the situation is safe enough for you.

The hotel and any rules will be there and I kind of will make sure that those rules are set and also in place and me and my team will ensure that attendees follow those rules. That's also what I want to clearly say. If you come to Berlin, mask wearing will not be optional. So we kind of, it's a difficult year for that and different here. And in case that the conference does not happen in Berlin, the conference will happen online. Okay. So if you bought a ticket for Berlin and you want a partial refund because the conference only happens online, if it's only happening online,

that, of course, is not a problem. That's available then. And, yeah, that's pretty much about the hybrid part. I'll be next week in Berlin and will then be able to tell you a bit more um about what are the plans for berlin what are the current restrictions in berlin do you know for like how big of a gathering you're allowed to have or that kind of thing um yeah well it's basically the room size and i think it would be be about 200 folks would be doable after the loss currently.

I think we will probably go down to less than that. And I will have to talk to the hotel and how we, you know, kind of refresh the contract for that. Because the contract basically is still stating 600. And that's not going to happen this year. Because even if we could do that, finding 600 people which want to come to Berlin is a challenge I guess I want to come to Berlin that's not really the problem at the moment right yeah it's just so many folks which which probably want to come but can't because travel restrictions and so it's like none of my keynote

speakers are able to come to Berlin because of travel restrictions so there are some speakers which plan to come and I'm happy to see them in Berlin one of them is Jonathan which I saw yesterday okay since it's going to be some sort of hybrid we hope

is there going to be any way for the online attendees to interact with the attendees in Berlin I'm not sure if that's going to be any way for the online attendees to interact with the attendees in Berlin? I'm not sure if that's going to be available. I could put some table with a webcam on and make sure it's connected to a room in Remo and you sit on that and you can talk to whatever person is there. But that person probably has to wear a mask because it's at the conference, so it's a bit difficult. But as I said, every person on the online, on the conference will have also access to the online part. So there will be some interaction and some people probably will

post pictures on Twitter, I will. And then there's the evening program and I think that the evening program will be only online so the audiences during the conference surely mix If you manage to have an in-person component at all I just realized this I think the last C++ conference that snuck in right before everything closed down was Embo++ Pretty sure that's right It was a bit of an interesting experience before everything closed down was Embo++. Pretty sure that's right. Yeah, okay.

I was there. It was a bit of an interesting experience, and I was very, very happy to go there because after that you lacked so much of social contact that you were kind of happy to see some of your fellow programmers and people you know from conferences and just have that experience and on the other hand it was a bit scary because the virus was just going around and we did not know as much as we know now and i think it's now a bit safer but also um we know a bit more about

what rules do apply and those rules apply now yeah by the way i asked about what your if you knew what the limits were in Berlin right now, because I think in Colorado at the moment, you cannot have an indoor gathering of more than a hundred people, no matter what. It doesn't matter the size or if everyone's wearing masks or whatever. Like, I think there's a hard limit. I could be wrong, but I thought that was the case the limit is kind of how many people in what distance you can sit on a on a table alone right okay and makes sense yeah that makes sense then there's like the laws and i've seen some reports of some uh some gathering of 600 folks uh in the end of september in berlin but that's in a different hotel.

They didn't have the space. And then there's some other seatings and I just... I don't think that we get to 200. It would be nice to have 200 attendees in Berlin, don't get me wrong. But I think it's unrealistic. I hope for maybe 100.

That would be nice. To see... My recollection, I could be wrong, but my recollection is you have a large percentage of your attendees are German normally. Yes. Okay. So at least those who are interested are coming from a country where they don't have to worry so much about border crossings and and and so much but yeah definitely still going to be hard i'm sure for most people yeah well anything else you want to let us know about meeting c++ this year before we let you go any uh keynotes you want to share anything like that yes i i announced the the keynote uh the closing keynote this um for this year today oh it's going to be uh gabi does rest oh awesome

talking about uh writing software or programming in the large and c++ 20 i'm looking forward to that talk and wrote an announcement about that today and something else i might want to to plug um i think from next year on i'm going to also be available as a consultant for doing work with either code or with the C++ community. So if your company is looking for advice regarding the C++ community, because I think I have a unique experience with that as running the conference for this while and attending many other events and knowing so many folks in the community that I would be able and willing to do a bit of consulting in that direction. And from a coding perspective, is there any particular focus or specialty or anything that you want our listeners to be aware of that you are available for?

I think I know Qt quite well and some of the new standards maybe, but I have to look into that case by case to decide if it makes sense to take the case myself or maybe to tell someone else. Well, I know some other trainer who can help you with that. Okay. Awesome. Well, it's been great having you on the show again today, Jens. Good luck with the upcoming conference.

Thank you. I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for coming on. 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.

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