Italian C++ Conference 2017: Wrap-up post

Italian C++ Conference 2017


Last June 17 we had the Italian C++ Conference 2017 in Milan, one of the events totally focused on C++ organized by the Italian C++ Community that I lead and manage. ~230 people signed up for the conference and about 160 attended. We are really disappointed about the drop rate (~30% – higher than usual). Probably, the nationalwide transport strike that happened in Italy the day before did a number on the conference.

The event was hosted at Università Bicocca of Milan.

The event was the biggest one I ever organized: 160 attendees, 7 sponsors, 10 technical sessions splitted into two tracks, a panel on diversity and inclusion and, above all, no budget! Indeed, the event was totally free and realized thanks to the support of the sponsors and me and my staff’s willingness. I love spending a good part of my spare time (and also some nights) on organizing free meetups, activities and events for people who want to join the ecosystem.

I really enjoyed the event, the vibes were great and I met many new people!

Find here a bunch of pictures of the event.

THANK-YOU!

Let me spend some kind words to thank who made the event possible:

My staff, in particular: Alessandro Vergani, Guido Pederzini, Marco Foco, Raffele Rialdi, Illya Dudchenko, Davide Di Gennaro, Franco Milicchio, Gian Lorenzo Meocci. You are awesome, thanks a lot!

Our sponsors: Bloomberg, JetBrains, KDAB, Think-Cell, Abaco Group, Recognition Robotics, JFrog/Conan. Thanks for your big support!

Our outstanding speakers: Michael Wong, Phil Nash, Bartosz Milewski, Jens Weller, Dietmar Kühl, Raffaele Rialdi, Davide Di Gennaro, Paola Presutto, Carlo Pescio, Stefano Cristiano. Thanks for sharing your experiences with the ecosystem!

Università Bicocca, for hospitality and support. Thanks a lot!

Last but not least, a big thanks to ~160 people who attended the Italian C++ Conference 2017! You rock!

Some stats on the audience

As usual, when people sign up for the event we ask a few questions about their experience with C++ and tools. Let me share some data with you.

Attendees age:

  • oldest attendee: 64,
  • youngest: 14,
  • average: 36.

Attendees gender:

  • male: 148,
  • female: 7.

Attendees not coming from Italy: 20.

Responses to the C++ survey:

(I don’t know C++ – Novice/Student – Fluent – Expert)

(I don’t use C++ at work – Rarely – At least half of the time – Daily/Most of the time)

(C++98/C++03 – C++11 – C++14 – C++17)

(for some unknown reason, Evenbrite normalized this histogram in 0-92 but the chart is actually based on the whole set of data).

(VS – CLion – Eclipse – VSCode – DevC++ – QtCreator – VAX – ReSharper++ – Other)

(Boost – Qt – MFC – POCO – JUICE – Scientific Libs – Graphics Libs – Physics Libs – Other)

Structure and contents of the event

The Italian C++ Conference 2017 in numbers:

  • 8×60′ (parallel) technical sessions
  • 1×75′ (plenary) keynote
  • 1×45′ session on diversity and inclusion
  • 1×20′ interactive panel on diversity and inclusion
  • 130′ allocated for breaks and networking

We had two plenaries (the keynote and the session on Diversity and Inclusion by Microsoft) and two parallel tracks (one in Italian and the other in English).

Our outstanding keynote speaker Michael Wong talked about C++ executors to enable heterogeneous computing in tomorrow’s C++ today.

The other sessions:

  • Diversity and Inclusion in Microsoft by Paola Presutto;
  • Quicker Sorting by Dietmar Kühl;
  • An overly simple C++ idiomatic pattern language for message-based product families by Carlo Pescio;
  • Boost vs Qt: What Could They Learn From Each Other? by Jens Weller;
  • Lambda out: a simple pattern for generic output by Davide Di Gennaro;
  • Monads for C++ by Bartosz Milewski;
  • Costruire un bridge C++ tra NodeJS e C# by Raffaele Rialdi;
  • Functional C++ for Fun and Profit by Phil Nash;
  • Una libreria di rete asincrona scritta in C++ ispirata a Node.js by Stefano Cristiano.

We also hosted an interactive panel on diversity and inclusion moderated by Charlotte Zhao and Andrea Chiarini from Bloomberg:

Diversity Panel by Bloomberg

Videos are in post-production and (I hope) will be published by the end of July. Further communication will follow.

Stefano Cristiano

Stefano Cristiano

Phil Nash

Phil Nash

Raffaele Rialdi

Raffaele Rialdi

Bartosz Milewski

Bartosz Milewski

Dietmar Kühl

Dietmar Kühl

Jens Weller

Jens Weller

Davide Di Gennaro

Davide Di Gennaro

Paola Presutto

Paola Presutto

DSC_0194

Feedback

This time ~60% of attendees gave feedback. It’s been very good so far and I’d like showing you some charts (1 corresponds to the minimum rate, 5 to the maximum):

#itCppCon17 and gifts

As usual, we set up a social contest and awarded the “best tweets” with hashtag #itCppCon17.

DSC_0572

DSC_0589

DSC_0576

Some winning tweets and reactions after being awarded:

vector t = {“R9”, “R7”} ; for_each(par, t.begin(), t.end(), [](const track &t){t.attend();}); // throws std::bad_alloc #itCppCon17

— drdanz (@drdanz) 17 giugno 2017

«”Monad” used to be a dirty word» – still is in Veneto #itCppCon17

— Matteo Italia (@cvtsi2sd) 17 giugno 2017

Thx for the book #itCppCon17! I promise I’ll be diving into it asap 🙂 #summerreads pic.twitter.com/KWEEN1j1KN

— std::async (@omissis) 17 giugno 2017

Thanks for the book, I promise that I will finally learn proper sync (no more brutal polling over atomic_int!) #itCppCon17 pic.twitter.com/UCnQeIxOQh

— Matteo Italia (@cvtsi2sd) 17 giugno 2017

Thanks to O’Reilly Media and Manning for the free books!

What’s next?

Well, my mind is already heading towards the second annual event that we usually organize: the C++ Day. My staff and I would like to make it happen in Bologna or Modena by December…we’ll keep you posted! If you are keen on helping or sponsoring please get in touch.

Thanks to all!