StockholmCpp in 2018

We started the year at the Atlas Copco office in Stockholm. Not everyone can have a meetup in a cave 20 meters below the surface, but we did.

It was a fulminant start into 2018 with a great program. An evening with 4 talks, excellent topics, great presentations. One of the talks with 2 speakers, something we did not have before.

February we visited the NYX Gaming Group in Stockholm, which has meanwhile combined with SG Interactive to become SG Digital.

We had 2 talks, one of them a talk which was later given at the ACCU in London. I like it a lot when speakers try out a presentation at our user group!

Worth to mention: For this event I had help with the rendering of the videos from Kjell-Olov. He managed to produce the best 10 seconds opening of a C++ talk ever ;-)

In March we had our second distributed meetup at King, this time together with London and Berlin. This event was, as all events at King, organized by Jean.

It was a great experience and also an exciting evening, We had talks from London, Berlin and Stockholm, so a lot of program with excellent talks. We noticed that for this meetup format we had a slightly too busy schedule, but that’s OK. In the future, less TV time at distributed meetups and more breaks.

In April we visited Tritech and had, for the first time ever, a workshop. The topic was CMake.

Florent did a great talk and prepared an excellent workshop. His video has the most likes of all of our videos on youtube. No wonder, the talk was outstanding and handled the topic very well. A very useful intro to CMake for a lot of people.

In May I needed an event organization break, so I just made a coffee break, a meetup in a coffee shop.

These types of meetup, while maybe not very exciting, are very important for me. They give me the chance to communicate with people throughout the whole evening. Evenings with program and talks let less time for communication, and when I organize an event with talks, program and sponsors my communication time is even more restricted.

While this type of meetup does not attract too many people, we are usually more than a handful and I enjoy such evenings a lot. There should be more events of this kind.

In June we visited HiQ, who hosted this event.

This year we had an extreme hot summer in Sweden and this meetup was the hottest one ever. The AC was on its limit transporting away the heat, and this had unfortunately a side effect. It was the first event in our history where I did not manage to get everyone from the waiting list into the event since we were overbooked.

The event topic was data processing techniques and algorithms and we had 2 interesting talks about these topics.

Stockholm, and whole Sweden, is on vacation in July, and so was StockholmCpp :-)

In August, still unusual warm in Stockholm, we had a visitor from Malmö, or Iceland ;-)

We have been at the Foo Café Stockholm, a great place that hosts a lot of user group meetups.

Ólafur, who started the Malmö C++ user group, visited Stockholm to chat a bit and give a talk. Additionally we had several lightning talks, so in sum 5 talks on one evening.

There was also a lightning talk raffle. The lightning talks raffle is an idea by Adi, from the CoreCpp user group. He sent us some fortune cookies with lightning talk topics and people could pick such a cookie to have a lightning talk topic for an upcoming meetup. The November meetup was filled with talks from this raffle. What a great idea!

Since the Foo Café Stockholm is a great place, we were happy they could host us again in September.

This evening was a lot of fun, and we had 2 super interesting talks. I don’t know why, but I remember this as one of our best events ever. It is hard for me to explain why, it’s not just about the talks, or the location, or the people, it’s the mixture of all of this and more that can give an evening like this the extra kick.

The third distributed meetup at King, this time together with CoreCpp Israel and Malmö

This event was again organized by Jean and with all the improvements over the previous distributed meetups the evening was just great!

Stockholm claims to be the inventor of the distributed C++ meetups, because we are, and this time there was another novelty for the C++ world. A distributed C++ presentation.

Björn, in Stockholm, and Adi, in Israel, gave a presentation together. The topic was, at least for me, interesting, and the presentation style, with 2 presenters at 2 sites, was super exciting. Adi and Björn managed this challenge excellent!

Together with the lightning talks, one from each of the 3 locations, this program formed the best distributed meetup so far. I hope to see more!

Big thanks to Berotec, who stepped in on short notice to host us after another event venue had to cancel. What a nice meeting place, I hope to be there again.

This evening was the result of the lightning talk cookie raffle we had previously this year, in August.

We had 3, for us, new speakers who had never spoken at one of our events before. They did a great job!

Also remarkable, 3 talks about speaking at events or user groups.
I really hope that these talks can help to attract additional people to speak at their local user group. Speakers are really needed. Without program, no such events.

All in all, it has been 9 talks on one evening. Our record so far. A lot of work for the video post processing, but worth to do it.

In December we visited again Tritech, one of my favorite places for our meetups. I did not plan any meetup for December, since December is a busy month for a lot of us. But we had 2 short talks available and the idea for a coding dojo, so I organized this event.

The format was kind of an experiment. I understand that a coding dojo is not something that everyone likes. Especially after a busy working day. But I think it worked out good. Mixing 1 hour of talks and 2 hours of coding exercises for those who want it is, in my opinion, a nice mix and should provide something for most people. I got some positive feedback about the coding tasks, so we might do something similar again in future.

It was a really busy year, and maybe I will do an extra summary blog post about it. This post is already long enough ;-)

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.