StockholmCpp in 2020

Time for the yearly StockholmCpp summary, and this year I can not say how time flies like last year, in respect to our user group activity. Physical meetups did not do that well, due to Covid-19.

However, we had some activities and were able to share content. So here the summary:

January

As meanwhile usual, we started the year at the Atlas Copco office in Stockholm. In the cave, 20 meters below the surface. I like that location a lot!

I was happy for being able to announce the event with 3 super talks on various topics, and have a truly multi-subject start into the year. Jonas was talking about some tips and trick and war stories, Paul about crypto number generation, and Tobias about how to produce the fastest clang on the planet.

February

The last time at the location where we had our very first user group event with talks, at the - now old - Tritech office in Sundbyberg.

Tritech will still host some of our meetups, but at a new location, not too far away from that one. However, knowing that this will be our last event there made me nostalgic at that evening :-)

We had a little bit of a problem with the projector and screen recorder setup for Stefans talk and needed to restart it after a break. This was challenging, and a bit unfortunate, but in the end, everything went well. I might make an extra post about recording talks in the future, will see. But we managed to get all talks recorded and they are all on youtube.

Beside Stefan, who talked about C++ in embedded RTOS, I did a lightning talk on why const should be a type, and Mathieu talked about how to improve your codebase with tooling.

March, the canceled event

We had an exciting program in the queue, but … history, you know … 2020, Covid-19, ….

However, canceled does not mean that the event will not happen in the future. The current plan is still to start with this event as soon as public events are a thing again.

So it will become the restart event, whenever this will be possible.

Event announcement

And that’s it for 2020

I had speakers, program, and event host for March, April, May, and June was already in panning, but … lockdown.

A little bit more

Ok, this was not everything, there have been a few other community-related activities.

Virtual events

So, what about virtual events, this is the year of virtual events, isn’t it?

Personally, I did not have a lot of enthusiasm for creating an online meetup. For me, a meetup is dependent on physical interaction. Seeing others, seeing the speaker, having the live atmosphere of a room …
And there are plenty of virtual events you can attend, but, personally, I spend already enough time in from of a screen. So, no, I did not want to run a virtual event.

We announced one in May, but this was basically doing some advertisement for an existing event that happened anyway. It had enough C++ in the topics to look interesting, so I put it online.

And there will be a virtual meetup in December! This is totally done by some people in Gothenburg, members of GbgCpp, the Gothenburg C++ Meetup. But we announce this also at StockholmCpp, to raise visibility. Because for the virtual events, it does not matter where you are.

SwedenCpp website

Due to not organizing meetups I had quite some time left to spend, so I used that time to add some additional features on the swedencpp.se website.

C++ meetups around the world

Since I did not want to create online meetups but provide access to such, I created a list with upcoming C++ meetup around the world. Since all of them are online during C-19 restrictions, everyone can attend every online meetup.

www.swedencpp.se/worldwide

The only feature I have to add is to show all times in the Swedish time. Times are currently local times of the meetup location, so you need to translate that for your time yourself.

C++ blogs

I never found a replacement for google reader that aggregated my favorite C++ blogs. Ok, I also did not seriously search for one. I always thought one day I will just make my own one.
Now it exits :-)

www.swedencpp.se/blogs

It does not include conference videos, since each conference publishes a lot of videos over a short time once a year. But videos of content creators, individual with C++ dedicated video channels and channels of C++ user groups.

C++ video feed

I always wanted to have a list of C++ relevant videos as they are released, to see what new videos arrive, and to populate my watch later list.
Not this list exits. :-)

www.swedencpp.se/videos

C++ Community Organizers around the world

I am in contact with other C++ community organizers around the world via cppcom.org. CppCom has been created by an initiative of Jan Kalb. So the name similarity to cppcon is not an accident ;-) We meet online every few weeks, a little less than once a month, to chat about the C++ community, events, and exchange ideas.

There has even been a C++ Community Organizers Panel at CppCon 2020. You can watch the video here.

The future of meetup (the website)

The future of meetup is, imho, uncertain. After lasts year’s odyssey with WeWork, it is now an own entity again, and I guess, waiting for the next buyer. I hope the webpage and the service will at least stay as it is for now. You might not be aware of it, but there have been some crazy ideas about how to make money with that service.

So I am still looking for a second platform where I can announce the group events in parallel. For some time I was hoping that gettogether.community will be an alternative, but I am unsure about the development status of that project.

Summary

Not just from the user group point of view,the year was absolutely not as expected, but it was still interesting from a community perspective. I am pretty sure some things that have been taken off this year will stay, as some online user group events for example.

However, I am looking so forward to the time where we can come together to meet at one of our event hosts, enjoy live talks, and have a chat over some pizza and drinks. Let’s hope that this will soon be a reality again.