StockholmCpp in 2019

Again time for the yearly summary, how time flies! (Wasn’t it just recently we had the last one?)
What an interesting and busy year! We visited new and known locations and sponsors, listened to new and known speakers who presented great talks, and we had an average of over 60 visitors per event. What a great group!
2019 was the year SwedenCpp celebrated it’s 3rd birthday, and here an overview about what we did.

January

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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 an other one by Björn about the (back then) status of C++ contracts.

February

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

At this time I had so much stress with my (meanwhile ex) job that I did not want to make 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.

March

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

April

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An other, for us, new location, this time at ÅF.

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

May

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

June

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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 related 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, an helped me more than once organizing events at Berotec. He was also a very active speaker at our events. I collected all talk he gave for us on this memory page. RIP

July

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

August

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We continued end of August at Tritech with 2 talks that have later been seen at international conferences. In short, they where great! (But are this not 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.

September

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

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

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

October

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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 abut C++ an Python, respective Cython.
And one by Arvid about network programming with boost ASIO, a really intensive intro.

November

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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, what is, imho, 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 have been: Ruslan with a talk about git, Daniel, explaining us how cppcheck gets tested, and Arvid about memory order in multi thread programs.

This was a great final event for 2019!

December

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 in the city I haven’t bee before, so see and test something new. Hopefully some people will join to talk about C++, and what ever.

Summary

2019 was, again, a busy year. We had 9 meetups with in sum 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 Pauls 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. Also the checklist of things to not forget for each event, and before each talk, grows. But so far it is manageable.

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

Also worth to mention is cppcom, and 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 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 thats fine.

So far I still fully enjoy my community work and my family is still 100% supporting me, what is great, because without support from home nothing would be possible.
And of course there are all the people that contributed their work. Speakers who created presentation, people who helped me with event organizations or other details, and all the people that 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 .