Category: announcement

Unofficial Update on C++Now 2104

I want to point out that what I’m saying here is “unofficial.” Any dates or details about C++Now that are known for certain we would publish on the official C++Now website. I’ve gotten a number of message from people about the 2014 conference and I wanted to let people know what to expect.

Dates

The dates are May 12-17. This is official, but it might be a little surprising or confusing. For all of conference history, going back to the misty beginnings of BoostCon, the conferences has started with registration followed by a reception or other socializing on Sunday and the first technical sessions on Monday morning. This year registration and the reception will be on Monday with the first technical sessions starting on Tuesday morning. The conference isn’t shorter, it will end on Saturday instead of Friday. We’ve made this change to accommodate individuals that don’t want to travel on Sunday which is Mothers’ Day in the US.

Hotel

Also official is that the last day to get the Early Bird discount (saving $20 per night) on hotel rooms at the Aspen Meadows is January 10th. This is coming right up, so make your arrangements right now. Do not wait for registration to open!

C++Now

Here is what is unofficial:

Content

Although we did have to extend the submission deadline (it seems that we always do) we ended up with a nice number of quality submissions (we always do!), so we’ll have three tracks just like we did the last two years. We haven’t finished reviewing the submissions so it will be awhile before we will have a schedule online or even be able to let submitters know what has been accepted.

Student/Volunteers

We will again have Student/Volunteers. We did this for the first time last year and it was quite successful. Last year we had seven volunteers (grad students, undergrads, and a high school student) and we were able to raise funds for travel and lodging for all of them. We found that seven was more than we needed, so this year we’ll probably have fewer. We will certainly waive registration fees for volunteers, but how much we can help with travel and lodging depends on how successful we are raising funds for that purpose. If you are or know someone who is interested in applying to be a Student/Volunteer, be ready to submit your application. We’ll want to see your résumé and a personal statement about why we should choose you. We’ll probably be accepting these Real Soon Now™.

Registration

But what most people seem to be concerned about is registration. This isn’t surprising. Last year, for the first time, we sold out. It was very gratifying to sell out. But it was very painful to have a waiting list full of people that we had to disappoint.

We are pretty close to opening registration for 2014. We expect to sell out again this year. In fact, we expect to sell out even sooner because, unlike last year, people know that we’ve sold out before. Last year we sold out by the middle of March. How soon we’ll sell out this year is anybody’s guess, but it is clear already that people are concerned about ending up on the wait list.

So my advice, if you are interested in attending is:

  1. Make your hotel arrangements now!
  2. If you need approval from your boss or spouse to attend, start working on that now.
  3. Watch for the “registration is open” announcement.
  4. Don’t hesitate when registration opens. (Unless you have made a presentation submission – see Submitters below.)

Where should you look for the “registration is open” announcement? Well you could check the official website everyday, but who is going to remember to do that? If you use a feed reader, there is an RSS feed you can follow. You can also follow the official twitter account. You can also expect the announcement on any of these Boost mailing lists: the user list, the developer list, and/or the interest list. I also expect to see it reported on isocpp.org. (If you were on last year’s wait list, you’ll receive an email from Marshall Clow, the conference registrar, with the announcement.)

Submitters

If you have made a session submission, do not register now. If you’ve submitted a session, we’ll hold a place for you. When the decision is made about which submissions will be accepted, we’ll contact you with instruction about how you can register. Even if we’ve decided not to accept your submission, you’ll have a chance to register.

Good luck and I hope to see you all in Aspen this May!

Comment on Google+.

Boost to Git Modular

As has been reported in a few places, Boost is transitioning from Subversion to Git. The Boost Steering Committee has voted to “push the button” which amounts to shutting down the SVN repository and making a final run of the conversion script. There are a lot of details available on the Boost wiki.

octocat

The motivating issue for this transition is not just to see Boost move to a repository system that has become the de facto standard for open source projects, but to support better modularity for the Boost Libraries. Boost policy has been to encourage developers to depend on existing Boost libraries rather than to “re-invent the wheel.” But this leads to a lot of intra-library dependencies that discourage users that may be interested in only a small number of libraries.

Moving to Git doesn’t solve this problem, but it does move in the direction of modularity which is more and more important as the number of Boost libraries grows. (When I first visited boost.org, there were four libraries. Now I count one hundred twenty-six libraries.)

I want to make a big shout out to everyone that has worked to make this transition possible. I wish I new all the names, but some of the ones that I do know are: Dave Abrahams, Daniel Pfeifer, John Wiegley, and Beman Dawes. If you know someone who helped with this transition, please add a comment.

My goal is to update this blog every Tuesday, but next Tuesday I’ll be having major surgery so it is unlikely that I’ll online for awhile. If I don’t have something up by Monday night, it will likely be a while.