StockholmCpp in 2019

We started the year again at the Atlas Copco office in Stockholm, in a cave 20 meters below the surface.

Atlas Copco seems to become our traditional 'start into the new year' event host, and I am super happy about that.

We had 2 wonderful talks, one from Arvid about ABI compatibility, and another one by Björn about the (back then) status of C++ contracts.

In February we visited a new sponsor for us. Paradox Interactive. Being at a game company was of course interesting!

At this time I had so much stress with my (now former) job that I did not want to organize a meetup in February at all. Luckily, Mathieu took over the whole organization of the evening. This was great and welcome!

Mathieu gave a great talk about package management in C++, and then we had also a review of the book Realtime C++ by Stefan. Both talks have been excellent.

This was an intense month for me. I visited GbgCpp, the C++ user group of Göteborg, and gave a talk there. It was a great trip to the West Coast with my wife, child and dog, next year again!

We had also a meetup in Stockholm at the wonderful Foo Café Stockholm. It is very unfortunate that it seems the concept of Foo Café only works in Malmö, but not in Stockholm. I am unsure if we will ever be able to visit this great location again, but let’s see.

We had 2 fantastic talks, one from Tobias and one from Paul, with super interesting topics. A great evening!

Another new location for us, this time at ÅF.

We had a visitor from Göteborg, Johan, who gave a talk about ancient hardware, plus 3 lightning talks by Stefan, Arda and Jonas. A conference trip report, a book review and one talk about tooling.

No meetup in May. My (at this time soon to be former ;-)) job became too annoying and distracting, so I decided to focus on my family and the upcoming 3 years birthday event!

In June we visited Berotec at their wonderful office next to the water. It was our 3rd birthday, since it was June 2016 when I started to care about this wonderful user group.

And we had 3 fantastic talks!

Looking back, there is also a sad aspect to this meetup. It was the last time I saw Mikael Rosbacke, who passed away just some weeks after the meetup. Mikael acted as event host for this evening, and helped me more than once organizing events at Berotec. He was also a very active speaker at our events. I collected all talks he gave for us on this memory page. RIP

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

We continued at the end of August at Tritech with 2 talks that were later seen at international conferences. In short, they were great! (But aren’t all our talks?)

Björn and Mathieu shared their knowledge with us, and we had a real full house and a lot of fun at Tritech.

Again a new location for us: netinsight at their new location in Solna Businesspark.

And we also got introduced to a new topic for us: C++ on mobile phones. A very interesting intro from Jonas.

Additionally, Alexander did a book review of A tour of C++, and Arno showed us how unexpected C++ can sometimes be.

And again a new location: Prevas. Very nice!

Funny detail, this was the third meetup in succession close to the underground station Sundbyberg.

This was the first meetup where I used a new hardware device, a HDMI recorder, to record the presentations. Now we have everything twice, audio, video, and screen recording.

We had 2 fantastic talks, one by Arda about C++ and Python, respectively Cython.
And one by Arvid about network programming with Boost ASIO, a really intensive intro.

The final meetup with talks this year, at the new office at HiQ.

We had four talks to round up the 2019 season, each talk about 25 minutes, which is, in my opinion, pretty optimal for a lot of topics. To give also a talk in Stockholm I put myself on the speaker list. It is always a bit challenging, organizing an event but also speaking at it, but I think it went well. The other speakers were: Ruslan with a talk about git, Daniel, explaining to us how cppcheck gets tested, and Arvid about memory order in multi-threaded programs.

This was a great final event for 2019!

December just started, at time of writing this. No final decision was made so far but I think I will announce some julfika soon. (jul == Christmas and here some words about the Swedish fika)
In a coffee shop in the city I haven’t been to before, so we can see and test something new. Hopefully some people will join to talk about C++, and whatever.

2019 was, again, a busy year. We had 9 meetups with in total 24 talks. That enables us to share several hours of excellent video content.

It was the first year where I did 100% of the video editing work, which is fine since I usually enjoy this work. I added a hardware device for video capturing and together with Paul’s second video, now we have primary and backup solutions for all 3 required recordings: the speaker, the audio, and the slides/desktop.

It feels very professional, and I like it. Of course, the equipment I carry around becomes more and more extensive. Also the checklist of things to not forget for each event, and before each talk, grows. But so far it is manageable.

Another interesting aspect of 2019 was my career change, from which I expect it will positively influence the group. But this might become a post for its own, next year.

Also worth mentioning is cppcom, an initiative created by Jon Kalb. Once a month I can come together, via video chat, with some other C++ community organizers, and I enjoy this a lot. So far it was always fun. There is always something to learn or to get some inspiration from. It is also very nice to get in personal contact with user group organizers around the world. It adds about one additional hour per month to my calendar, and I am not always able to make it, but that’s fine.

So far I still fully enjoy my community work and my family is still 100% supportive of me, which is great, because without support from home nothing would be possible.
And of course there are all the people who contributed their work. Speakers who created presentations, people who helped me with event organization or other details, and all the people who visited our events. All this gives me a lot of energy and optimism to start into the next year of StockholmCpp.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this yearly summary.