CppCast - Meeting C++ and Embedded

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Rob and Jason are joined by Jens Weller to discuss the upcoming Meeting C++ and Meeting Embedded conferences as well as some new from the Meeting C++ platform. Jens Weller is the organizer and founder of Meeting C++. Doing C++ since 1998, he is an active member of the C++ Community. From being a moderator at c-plusplus.de and organizer of his own C++ User Group since 2011 in Düsseldorf, his roots are in the C++ Community. Today his main work is running the Meeting C++ Platform (conference, website, social media and recruiting). His main role has become being a C++ evangelist, as this he speaks and travels to other conferences and user groups around the world. News Why optional references didn't make it into C++17 2018-10 pre-San Diego mailing available CppCon 2018 Contest Results: the most awful, surprising, horrific, inventive, well-formed C++ construct you can fit in a tweet CppCon 2018 Videos Jens Weller @meetingcpp Jens Weller's GitHub Links Meeting C++ 2018 Meeting Embedded 2018 Meeting C++ Recruiting Sponsors Download PVS-Studio We Checked the Android Source Code by PVS-Studio, or Nothing is Perfect Hosts @robwirving @lefticus

Episode 172 of CppCast with guest Jens Welle, recorded October 18th, 2018. Today's sponsor of CppCast is the PVS Studio team. PVS Studio can be considered both as a tool for finding errors and typos, and a static application security testing tool. The tool supports the analysis of C, C++, and C-sharp code. In this episode, we discuss some of the new papers headed to the C++ committee meeting in San Diego. Then we talk to Jens Weller from Meeting C++. Jens talks to us about

the upcoming Meeting C++ and embedded conferences and much more. Welcome to episode 172 of CBPCast, 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. How are you doing? Doing pretty good. Don't really have any news myself to share you have anything no i guess not not at the moment just getting ready for the holidays and a bunch of travel and stuff yeah yeah you're gonna be busy for the next few months okay well i'll tell you sort of like a piece of feedback uh

this week i actually got a tweet from kate gregory uh she's out at pacific plus plus right now i think she's one of the keynoters there yes and uh she just took a picture of the sticker table and i uh actually gave her about like a dozen cp cast stickers when i saw her at cp con so she was able to uh put those out on the table. That's fun. That's two years in a row that CppCast has been represented in some way at Pacific++. Well, I hope

that's a good conference. I'm sure that's only like a two-day conference, and I'm sure they'll be putting up videos pretty soon afterwards. I think that's right, two days, yeah. Well, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the show as well. You can always reach out to us

on Facebook, Twitter, or email us at feedback at cbcast.com. And don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. Joining us again today is Jens Weller. Jens is the organizer and founder of Meeting C++. Doing C++ since 1998,

he is an active member of the C++ community. From being a moderator at c++.de and organizer of his own C++. Doing C++ since 1998, he is an active member of the C++ community. From being a moderator at C++.de and organizer of his own C++ user group since 2011 in Dusseldorf, his roots are in the C++ community. Today, his main work is running the Meeting C++ platform. His main role has become being a C++ evangelist. As this, he speaks and travels to other conferences and user groups around the world. Jens, welcome back to the show. Hey, great to be back. Yeah, 2011, that has to be one of the longer-running C++ user groups, I'm thinking.

Yeah, we are having our anniversary every year in December, so soon it's going to be seven years. It's also kind of the root of the conference. The next year, I just realized that there's a user group I have people which would be interested to also run a conference and become like my staff and mostly my staff till today. And meeting in Aspen, so many other folks from Germany and Europe, which wanted to have a C++ conference, a true C++ conference in Europe, kind of got me motivated to do it the first time in 2012. That's pretty crazy, though, that you met up with many of your C++ German developers in Aspen.

That's what you said, right? Yeah, no, there's a group of European attendees every year at Aspen. And so I was surprised by that too, but they also were very supportive, and also Jean-Claude. That was a long time ago, 2012. Yeah. Well, I think if you were to look at our numbers

for CBPCast, the percentage of people, the percentage of guests that we've had who are from Germany is unusually high, I think. Yeah. I've been at the user group in Berlin, which also exists since 2012, Tuesday. And they had a full meeting, and we were just hosting at some startup which is doing something in sound technology with sound speakers, and it was pretty cool that's

neat okay well jens we got a couple news articles to discuss uh feel free to comment on any of these and then we'll start talking to you about more recent news you've been making with meeting c++ okay okay okay so first one uh we have another article from Fluent CPP, Jonathan Bocara's blog. And this one is why optional references didn't make it into C++17. And it kind of basically goes into an argument that was had in the C++ committee that they couldn't come to a resolution on what happens when you assign something to an optional reference. And apparently, Boost boost made decision. And,

uh, you know, if you are using boost optional, uh, it will work. You can use optional references, but it's not supported with a super plus 17. Yeah.

And Jonathan is really like up to his game lately. Cause the last article we had on here, he had a herb review it. This article was based on an interview that he had with the author of boost optional and i believe he's also at least one of the ones working on who worked on the optional proposal into the standard right yeah i will say like i never really thought there was much of a controversy here but then after reading it yeah i get it and i have actually recommended to a few people lately

which it's very very wordy but you can do a standard optional of a standard reference wrapper and at least there is no ambiguity at all in this case you know exactly what assignment should do or whatever in those cases maybe I'll just stick with recommending that for when you need that kind of thing.

That's an interesting take, yes. I can understand that it's not in 17, that we just want to have some more time to have types more established and to flesh out some of the design later and just have a light version first. And I can understand version first. I can understand both sides. I can understand

that you want to have something like a reference and an optional just acting like a reference and I can understand that an optional still should act like an optional. Do either of you have an opinion on whether we should be

binding or not binding optional references if we did have it my opinion would be that it should rebind if you were to assign an optional reference because that is consistent with i mean you are assigning the underlying or the the thing that's being held which is a reference not the value. That's my opinion, but I totally see the argument. Yeah. Okay. The next thing we have is the full list of the pre San Diego mailings. And it is a long list. I mean, it's two full pages of all the proposals that are to be discussed at San Diego. And I'll be honest, I don't recall seeing this type of list or looking at it. I'm sure it comes out before every meeting, but I don't remember looking at it before in the past.

Is this a particularly lengthy list for San Diego? It seems like it is. Well, just for the record, the link that we actually have in the show notes is just part one of two. Yeah, that's true. Okay. There's a whole lot. And I believe it is the longest list yet 265 papers or something like that is that right yes it's 276

papers um actually yesterday i went with my own user group and decided off through um not not all of them we had to look at them and you ones, the ones which we thought could be interesting we looked at and some of them were not every paper is presentable and often I just use the search function to jump to the point which was interesting for us at that moment

we had a module paper which is like, I don't know, lots of pages about modules and we were like, what about macros? And so we found out that and there's a great paper with the title down with type names. Okay. From Nina runs and David funderfort. And also, yeah, this is a very good paper and very understandable removing type name in some situations where the compiler doesn't need it anymore, makes C++ more concise and has a bit of less typing for us as programmers. This actually has a chance to go through a talk on Monday when I was in Berlin with Fabio Fracassi, the German part of the delegation for San Diego

and other meetings from the committee. And he had a very good impression about this paper and also said that with David van der Voort, it comes from an implementer and has a solid opinion on actually if this is implementable and said it would help in the committee. So is it implementable then if there's an opinion on it?

Well, basically what he said is if David comes up with such a thing and writes a paper about it with a co-author, they probably only will make additions or remove the need for type name in situations

where we either don't need it anymore. It's not like remove type name in total, just remove it in situations where it's actually not needed anymore. That is, I mean, for any of us who have been programming in C++ for any length of time, we know how often the compiler tells us you need type name here.

If the compiler can tell you that we need type name there, then maybe we don't need type name there. That's a good point. Well, there are some situations which are ambiguous without type name. The other situations where the compiler could not tell us that we

need type name there, but could do the right thing from the context, we could get rid of type name. That's exactly the point of the paper. Right. I noticed... Any other... Go ahead. No, yeah, I was just going to say what else I had noticed. John Heed has been prolific. He has got like four papers in flight right now.

And they're all related to things that I find interesting. There's a ton of constexpr things out there. We discussed one of them briefly with Hannah on the last episode. Yep. And what else stood out to me? Oh, libformat, which I just covered in a C++ Weekly episode, is on its third draft of its paper for standardization.

Yeah, that might go into 20. That would be really cool. And there's actually a talk about format at the upcoming conference, meeting C++. I've been using it and I've been very pleased with the library. Next article we have is a blog post from Richard Smith.

Before CppCon, he sent out this tweet saying, I'm running a mini contest during this year's CppCon. Show me the most awful, surprising, horrific, inventive, well-formed C++ construct you can fit in a tweet. Best entries judged by me wins an iPad. And it looks like he got 40 entries, and he posted them all here on his blog, made some comments about them,

and the winner was Jonathan Mueller. Yes. Were there any particular tweets you wanted to call out here, Jason? I seriously actually just read through all of these, and they are, some of them are gold. And this, so for those who don't know who Richard Smith is, he is the editor of the C++ standard.

Yeah. So Richard has a special relationship with the standard that most of us do not have. And he has a couple of comments. And one of them, he says, this is one of the few entries that had me reaching for my copy of the standard to double check the rules. Yeah, I remember that one.

Like, if Richard said that, it's probably something pretty goofy. And for that particular one, technically only MSVC actually followed the spec and compiled the code. Even though it was something that you really should never be doing in your code.

Yeah, it's... I like his entry from Donerson but also there was a lot of other good ones some of them, well maybe predictably for those of you who are on Twitter JF had many entries

Tony had several he was like a picture fits in a tweet so I tweet a picture of the code. Right. There's another one. It is absolutely horrific.

I'm going to see if I can find it quickly. That uses a non-compound switch statement, which is technically allowed no one would ever do it because you can have exactly one label in that case but um it's just brilliant like understanding of the lexical rules of the language in that one

which that's from JF oh the switch which combines like a do while loop something yeah I remember that one and it's all without any curlies in it basically so it's just like a do while loop something yeah yeah i remember that one and it's all without any curlies in it basically so it's just like a jumbled mess of nonsense it's all technically correct wonderful okay and then the last thing i wanted to mention just that the cbcon 2018 videos

are continuing to come out i think it was up to like 53 as of today oh that's three more than when i last maybe no it's just 50 i'm sorry uh but that's like a third of the videos i would imagine i think last something like that yeah so they're well on their way to uh publishing all these videos if you look at the current playlist for 2018 is 50 videos and last year's 2017 was 139. Oh, plus all the lightning talk videos. Yeah, plus the lightning talk should be over 200 probably by the time it's done this year. I imagine lightning talks are a lot easier to publish. They're just focusing on the full content videos first.

I don't know. I would imagine that each one is only five minutes long. Lightning talks are harder. Each one is only five minutes long. Yes, it's only five minutes long, but from the perspective of the person uploading it to YouTube, it takes the exact same amount of work as an hour and a half long video. Sure, but the editing process is shorter. Right.

I think the lightning talks are just recorded on block. So you have one hour of lightning talks or like the whole evening of lightning talks in one video file. And then you need to cut them up in the single lightning talks. And so it's probably a lot more effort to do them. And maybe they're just releasing the talks first because it's just one hour recording break, breaking the recording. Actually, that's how I know it from how I get the video files from my company. Right. And then I just have to

edit it together. And so the lightning talks I usually do first because I get to use the video tools. And so if I just have a learning effect there and learn something new, I'll just mess up a lightning talk and not talks or keynotes.

Okay. Well, since you're talking about your conference, uh, meeting C++ is coming up soon, uh, November 15th to 17th. Uh,

first of all, for listeners who are interested, is there still time to buy tickets? Um, probably not. So there's a waiting list where you can register an account and enter yourself on the waiting list.

But as I'm talking, the last tickets are probably selling today or tomorrow. And then when listeners are able to hear us, there's going to be a waiting list and I might be able to release

a few more tickets, but it looks like that we are going to be 666 attendees at the conference this year and that's it. That's how much we can pack in the conference and next year we're probably going to go in a different setting,

a different layout for the main floor and then we can go beyond that. So 666 was your and then you can go beyond that. So 666 was your cap, and you have sold out, basically. Yes. That's a pretty good-sized conference. So you're still talking about staying in the Anders then next year? Yes.

But with a different layout. Yes, we can go to 750 to 800 in the hundreds. And so that's what I plan to do. But then we have to go in a different layout. So it's not anymore how we used to have the conference in the last years. Then we just have to change how we play. And then basically we rotate the chairs and everything of like a 90 degree to the edge. Okay. So you would actually be able to fit more rooms in, basically. Yeah, the room. Because of the way the room dividers work.

The current break area would not be a break area anymore. Then that's just seats. Right. So what keynotes do you have lined up for your talk for your conference this year? So there's three keynotes. The opening keynote is Andre Alexandrescu, and his title for the keynote is What is the Next Big

Paradigm? Then Lisa Lippincott, The Truth of a Procedure. And Nikolai Yuzutis is doing the closing keynote with the title, Fifty Shades of C++. I'm slightly terrified about that one. Nikolai's last couple of conference talks have been about some of the terrible issues

we have with initialization and that kind of thing. So I wonder where he's going to go with that. Yeah, I wonder too. I hope it will be a great keynote. Nikolai is really delivering there in the last years and knows his stuff out and very well C++, where the quirks are and what to improve. Right.

I'm also very curious what Andre's talk, what is the next big paradigm? Yeah, I have no idea. I usually only know the titles or keynotes. Sometimes speakers send me a description, but I think the counterpoint to a keynote is just that you should not be influenced by a description or something. Just have expectations. Just listen to the speaker.

It should be something inspirational. Makes you maybe reconsider how you're programming or something, I think as well. But yeah, that could be interesting. Sounds like a good lineup, for sure. And Lisa always delivers. Is this her first time coming to Meeting C++? Yes. Okay.

Her talks are always very popular at C++ now, I know. Yeah. And this is also going to be the first year of Meeting Embedded. Can you tell us about that conference? Yeah, so I started a new platform with Meeting Embedded, which is basically kind of what I do with Meeting C++ for the embedded area. So I also have like a listing of user

groups there and start to build this up. And this year is like the first time we make this year is the first time where this as a conference happens. More details on meetingembedded.com. And regarding the program, there will be nine talks about Embedded and a keynote by Dan Sachs, which I did just an interview with on the beginning of October.

And it's a mix of Embedded and Embedded C++. And that is the day before meeting C++? Yes, I will have this conference in the coming years, like as one day before the main conference. Okay. Do you know how many people are choosing to come to both conferences? Some do. Some do. Okay.

Honestly, I haven't spent a lot of time looking at meeting embedded to see what kind of user groups and how prolific it is. But it's not C++ specific, right? It's anyone that does embedded development with a flavor of C++ maybe? Yes, so C++ is welcome, but I aim really at the embedded sector

and not just aim at embedded C++. But of course as I have built up meeting C++ and there's a lot of embedded developers in that, of course, C++ has its home there. But also we have a talk on Rust. We have a talk on tooling. We have one talk about how she designed a workshop for Arduino.

So there's a lot of interesting talks which cover a lot of things. Okay. And are those talks going to be talks which cover a lot of things. Okay. And are those talks going to be recorded and put on YouTube as well? Yes. I plan to record those talks too and then share them on the Meeting C++ channel. And since you just said Meeting

C++ is sold out, is Meeting Embedded sold out? No, there are still tickets available for Meeting Embedded. Also, maybe you just want to quickly plug here, Nikolai's workshop on the 14th is also having available spaces, so if you are in Berlin and want to partake on

the workshop with Nikolai, that's possible. Oh, then we should talk about the workshops for a minute, because I don't think we've mentioned that really. Where do the workshops come and play in this, and how does that all work out? Well, there's on the 14th a workshop about modern c++ and template programming by nicolai okay and um yeah we just started talking in spring and nicolai was like i could do a training i was like okay i i have to ask the hotel if they have a room, and if that's available, let's do it. And so there's, on the 14th,

a full day training available with Nikolai. It's also on the website, which you can still partake in. Then the embedded conference is the other option on the 14th. Oh, okay, so they happen concurrently, and then the next day is meeting C++. Yes. Okay. Now, one of so they happen concurrently, and then the next day is meeting C++? Yes. Okay. Now, one of the talks that I couldn't help but notice

that you have coming up for meeting Embedded was from Wooter, and I have to admit, even though I've heard his name pronounced correctly several times, I still get a little lost with the Dutch name there, that he is planning a talk called We Stopped Teaching C, and that one really stood out to me, because that's a nice

tie-in with Kate's talk from several years ago, I think. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that talk, and I think that Wuder would be a great guest for your show. So, as far as I know, the college where Wuder works at switched recently from Teaching C to C++, also probably because he's involved in this a little bit. And so he's going to talk about why they switched and how they switched, in my opinion.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, Rob. We should try to see if we can get him on. He came to a talk that I gave in the Netherlands, and I saw him in the audience like, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to recognize you, but I can't remember why I felt terrible that I didn't recognize him until after the talk, but got the chance to catch up with him again. And the only other time we had met was at Meeting C++ last year. I'd like to interrupt the discussion for just a moment to bring you a word from our sponsors. Authors of the PVS Studio Analyzer suggest downloading and trying the demo version of the product.

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The tool supports the analysis of C, C++, and C Sharp code, and Java support is coming soon. Try it today. One of the newer resources on meeting C++ that I don't think we've talked about before is jobs and recruiting section. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. So I started rebuilding and building Meeting C++ as a platform this year. And one of the first features that launched in spring and in August is the new job section.

It consists of three parts. So there's the regular job postings. And there's a form where you actually can post your open positions to Meeting C++ for free. On other job related platforms, it usually costs just for posting something for 30 days on them. And then there's two commercial offers, which are targeted at employers for C++. First there's the employer listing where you are listed in the employer section at Meeting C++ with your profile and also your logo will be visible in every in the job section every job posting which is done at Meeting C++. And then there's another

offering called Meeting C++ HR which is basically you receive resumes which are directly through Meeting C++ uploaded in a CV upload form, which has arrived since August. Okay, so C++ developers can upload their CVs, basically, and have their information available for recruiters who are looking for positions. Yes. Okay, so kind of like... I'm sorry, go ahead. I distribute this to companies which are interested in doing this or interested in receiving that.

This is an offer which you can... And on the other hand, companies which partake in this support me through this. This is another free service, as I mentioned. And so, yeah, the model is someone is looking for a job.

They upload the CV to my site, and they get to choose to which companies they want to send that. Oh, I see. At the heading, there's just a field of companies where you just can click on this company. You can put in your cover letter. You upload your resume. You click send, and this generates a little bit of input for what I have to do, I have to check it, and then I send it to

the companies involved, and then they look at your resume, and if they think that's a fit, they're going to contact you. That sounds, I mean, I want to say more human than most job websites, that there's someone actually kind of involved looking at this a little bit.

Can you talk at all publicly about what companies are currently involved? Yeah, well, it's on the form. You can see it on the form. Right now it's Thinktel, TeamViewer, and some other companies. Okay. So what kind of response have you gotten so far from this new service? I still have to promote this more.

And right now we're still in the startup, so there's not a lot of companies to choose from. And I hope to have more companies on board, which will happen in the future I guess and also it's probably more easy to use that form for you and I still have to promote it a bit better and so far

I've seen like once a week someone uploading their CV and once I promote it I want to write to my attendees about this too and I guess there's going to be a lot more usage on that for the future. Well, yeah, if you get that directly out to the 700 approximately people that will be at your conference, plus whoever's listening to this episode,

I imagine we'll put a link to it in the show notes. Make sure you get that to us. I expect you would see some more. Yeah, some traffic and if your employer could be interested in that you can contact me and I'll just get you up as soon okay, that sounds like a good opportunity I know, at least right here

in the Denver area right now the C++ job market is good for developers I know companies who have had a hard time finding people now, the C++ job market's good for developers. I know companies who have had a hard time finding people. Yes. So yay for us. It's the same in Germany. It's the same in Germany. And most of my sponsors are also kind of looking for folks, if they're not having tools like

JetBrains and some other companies. A cute company is there, which also is looking for developers, but also has a product. But there's a lot of companies coming to contacting me and talking to me for the job market. And I'm trying to offer them a service. And that's one of the things I started noticing last year is the conference itself is now 1% of my total reach on social media, etc. And I have to find ways to offer this reach which I have to companies just to make it available in a form that I'm not selling things.

So that's why I designed it. And I'm planning to also have different other things which I'm just going to talk to you probably in a few minutes about. So there's still a lot of things I plan to do and some things are just already in a state that I can talk about it. Okay, you just said, did you say 1% of your total reach is the conference? So it's been a while since I've looked, but last time I looked, your Twitter follower reach

is just order of magnitude beyond what most other C++ people have. Do you know approximately what it is right now? Yeah, it's around 16,000. Then there's 5,000 on LinkedIn or over 5,000 on LinkedIn. Oh, wow. Then I have 6,000 on Xing.

I have over 11,000 on Xing. I have over 11,000 on YouTube. There's something like 28,000 on Facebook. Google Plus is still online. That's for another week, right?

I thought they took it down already. I don't know. Last time I looked, it was still online. But yeah, so I just started realizing. Last year, one thing I never talked about was, I talked about it at the conference. I learned last year, there's this one thing where, as a C++ developer, you're so used to,

and I learned this is really dangerous if you have some similar situation in the real world. So you only pay for what you use. And I had a big room contingent last year. And it didn't get fully used up, so I still had to cover a few nights with the hotel, which weren't solid. And I learned from that last year that I have to better communicate with my attendees about making sure that they book over the hotel contingent and how to book there, how to book correctly. Because some people are just, well, we booked in the hotel and that counts. No, it doesn't.

If you don't go over the right form, then maybe this booking doesn't count or I just have to talk to the hotel. On the other hand, it was for me interesting to see how the hotel would handle that. And they did handle it very much like, well, it's in the contract and we'd like you to pay that. And I could, but I thought, well, I have to change. And I also wanted to make meeting C++ every year better. And I also want to strive not to only be a conference because it's always, you know, I've done work for the user groups. I've done other things. I've started this review platform for libraries last year, which was not the big success. So I found out like this year that I don't actually have the time to continue that. I need to focus on actually finding ways to go further and also to reach the other 99%, which I have in my network and to basically

offer services to companies which are able to just also get a better way. So right now, most of my work is founded by the income from the conference and in the long run I want to kind of have Meeting C++ run on different sources of income. One of those incomes is the revenue I get from the companies which pay for the listing and at Meeting C++ and I have a Patreon now since this year and some other sources and some other ideas which I'm just working at. And then Meeting C++ will offer a lot of services in that manner to kind of counteract the risk which the conference brings. Well, since you discussed that, you said a moment ago that there are upcoming things that you want to discuss. What do you have planned for next?

Yes, let's talk about that. So one big thing I had to take care of this year was GDPR. Because I was last year having some tiny login system because I needed some internal tools for the conference. And then I wanted to make this more public, like a newsletter thing and some other things, some other services.

But then GDPR came in and for two months I had to learn what GDPR means for me and how to handle that and how to implement the things which GDPR mandates to my platform. I made some hard decisions. I said, well, handling emails is now a lot more important than in the past, but I also want them to be safe.

So every email, which is in the account system at Meaning C++ is encrypted now. And the passwords are also of course, hashed in a password hasher, which is by PHP. So that's safe. And so one of the things I've recently worked on is like things like a new lightning talk form, which I'm going to launch soon for my attendees. There's a password reset form, which I thought would be kind of good to have for the accounts. A form for guest posts on the blog is there. So if you want to do guest posting on my blog, that's now an easy form to fill out and send. And last Friday, I was redoing the schedule in Morant CSS. It's now not anymore based on a

HTML table. It's now based on CSS grid, and therefore, it's really dynamic in any meta or in any size where you ever want to look at it. It behaves a lot better now, which is really great. And then there's one feature which probably is

kind of interesting for Jason I'm currently working on a new idea which will make it possible to find C++ trainings through meeting C++ so I

plan to launch this feature at the conference and you can then go into the details Okay. So I plan to launch this feature at the conference. And you can then go into the details. So right now you can register as a trainer. And then there is also a form to request a training. And then I still have to write code to connect both of them. And at the end end I currently have the model that I'm probably you know transparently also it's if you register as a training trainer you can see that that I'm

basically charging the trainers if they're chosen from for to do the training a certain percentage from what they offered so that's transparently clear that they can just incorporate that in their prices. And in that way, I hope to have a platform where many trainers can be connected to the companies which actually are looking for trainings. Because I used to be a trainer too. And one of the reasons I got out of the market was that there's a lot of agencies which are similar working

like the freelancing agencies where you're just, where they're just looking for a trainer and they take kind of the trainer which thinks is the best fit or the cheapest one and they charge like double, I think. And that's not like, and then there's people like Jason, I think, who doesn't go through agencies anymore, or not that much, but probably has enough trainings to do. I almost did once. But then you declined. They never responded to me, and since then, yeah.

Well, I mean, we had a conversation for like three weeks, and then they stopped responding for whatever reason. Okay, yeah. Yeah. conversation for like three weeks and then they stopped responding for whatever reason okay yeah yeah yeah and that's it seems like something i i imagine a lot of people will take advantage of because i i know that several people have asked me about how to get into training so if there's like a common platform for this yeah yes yes i i try to make this a common platform. Meeting C++ should offer more to the community and also then

this commercial ecosystem which is backing C++ where companies can go find new employees or post job postings and otherwise just find trainings and also probably going to have

something similar and that for freelancers next year so there's gonna be a whole marketplace and meeting c++ in the future sounds interesting for c++ yeah yeah it sounds very interesting and sounds like it'd be a great resource for you know companies and employees who maybe don't even know how to look for trainers in the first place, aside from just reaching out to someone directly. Yes. And I try to kind of put some of the money which I make through this training platform then into advertising for the trainings platform and other things. And also, I kind of have to not make the full impact I need for running the company and meeting C++ from the conference.

So I don't need to make the tickets more expensive. And I still can afford to give away 50 free tickets, which also today is a deadline for each year. Meeting C++ gives away 50 free tickets, which is 25 tickets for students and up to 25 tickets for diversity and people who need support and financial way to come to the conference.

To be clear, literally today, October 18th, is the last day for that. By the time this airs, it'll be too late, unfortunately. Yes. Okay. When we were at CppCon, we talked to you during our Lightning Talk interview

about the Qt project you were working on. Was there more you wanted to share about that project? Yeah, we can just shortly talk about it. So I have not been able to work on this for weeks now, but I was at CppCon, and I was sitting in this one really interesting talk from Jason about, I think it's called CppBox? Oh, yeah, the C++ box, yeah.

And one of the things he said in that was like, you need a project to work on. I was like, yes, yes. That's a good idea. I just also want to work with Conan and make a new C++17-based project. It would be really fantastic to use this work, which I did this year,

to rewrite one of my applications and just to see how it plays out, to write Qt in a modern way and just also have the code base behind that be in a modern way. So my lightning talk was about an experiment I did with a library which is called Verdigris, which enables Qt to be usable with templates in contexts where QObject and signaling and slots plays a role. Like everything which you do with UI is that are in the models. And my hope is with that to be able to implement like a generic UI template library for Qt

or also other libraries you could just... So one of the ideas is to have different backends. So right now I use Qt as my backend because I just know Qt and I don't have to pay any time into working through a new UI library. And I have used Qt for years and it just makes very, very much sense to me to keep using Qt as a platform because all my code is based on it. But you simply could take this library, which I'm probably going to put on GitHub next year

when I just start working with GitHub, etc., to use it and write a backend for some other UI library. I don't know if it's applicable to the way you program with EM GUI, but you could write a backend

for WX widgets. Maybe, yeah. I mean, I obviously agree. You need a project to really get you trying the features and learning new things for sure. A project that you're interested in.

Okay, so are there any other changes you want to talk about with Meaning C++ that you want to share, Jens? I think there's not much that I can talk currently about. So right now in October, maybe that's a topic we could talk about. Like crunch, crunch is currently

like really in the media and I'm experiencing this currently for my conference. I crunch every October. October is my crunch month for the conference. Like your personal schedule crunch, like you're working 100 hours a week kind of thing. Right. I don't count it, but I also go out, et cetera, too. I know that I have counterpoints, but I just think that improving working conditions

that's important but every year for the conference I kind of have to go through six weeks through deadlines it becomes kind of crunch like because I have to do everything and a lot of things and on the other hand I'm working on

some things that make my life easier. So one thing which I still want to implement for the conference is a system where the speakers upload their slides or give me a link to their slides. And then I just, you know, still have to OK that. And then there's like another script which lists the slides of the conference. Right. Until now, I used to send the slides to some email, sent from my conference, and then I upload the slides to the website and link them. And then I try to improve that process

for both sides. That's because just have to upload it on the web form and then are just basically automatically done and listed without me just having to, they don't have to upload it on a web form and then are just basically automatically done and listed without me just having to... They don't have to wait for me and doing some work and listing that somewhere else. Yeah, that's one thing that has surprised me this year for CVPCon is it's still a surprisingly manual process for uploading our slides. We send an email.

But they're all hosted on GitHub. There's no reason why it couldn't at least just be pull request. Let the maintainer go click, okay, merge. Yeah, so one goal of my conference, or one goal for me is to have Meeting C++ to be as much as

possible in a way automated and low friction. Just a few days ago, I got the question from Hannah, your last guest. She still needed to register for the conference. I was like, no, actually, when you submitted your talk, I got all the data from you.

I need it, and you're automatically registered, and I don't have to send you a link and say, please register for the conference. Yeah, that's a good question. I think I still actually need to register for C++ on C, even though I am giving a

class and speaking at it now. Okay, well it's been great having you on again today, Jens. Thanks for joining us. I enjoyed talking to both of you. 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

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