CPPCon 2018: 3 must-see talks!
Written by Will Fehlhaber, Associate Software Engineer
CPPCon is an annual conference, hosted in the States, where C++ developers meet and discuss all things C++. Professionals of all levels of experience, engage with each other and learn how to push their industries forward across finance, tech, automotive, pharmaceutical and many other industries.
There are many great CPPCon talks that have been given over the years, but in this article, I want to share with you my top picks from CPPCon2018 that you need to see.
Kate Gregory “Simplicity: Not Just For Beginners”
Kate Gregory is a passionate C++ teacher and professional. Over the past few years, she has been strongly encouraging organizations to work with certain modern features of the C++ language to update legacy code. She has offered talks in the past as to how organizations can incrementally incorporate these features and she currently offers courses to new developers as to how to navigate legacy code. She pushes this agenda because readability and simplicity in a code base allows for more flexibility, testability and long-term maintainability. The benefit of this approach is that this brings down the cost of software development substantially and better prepares companies to compete in the future, as market forces and technology change.
Titus Winters “Modern C++ Design (part 1 of 2)”
Titus Winters has many excellent talks about design and architecture. He is excellent at explaining why and how organizations can navigate architecture and design. As an experienced engineer, he does not give prescriptions, but rather gives descriptions of various architectural problems and how to construct a solution. Perhaps most importantly, are the examples of things that are doomed to fail.
Chandler Carruth “Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security”
We live in a deeply connected world of computers, mobile phones, cars, IoT devices, satellites and cloud services. As a result, security is the biggest concern in tech and the 2018 conference had lots of presentations on this crucial topic.
Spectre presents to us a brand-new classification of software vulnerabilities and has fundamentally changed how software developers need to test and design software for security, especially as it relates to cloud services. Essentially, Spectre tricks software into reading arbitrary locations in memory. Therefore, an attacker can observe the content of those memory locations. In short, it combines the security threat of incorrect Speculative Execution to conduct an Information Leak via a Side Channel. There are a few distinct variations of this vulnerability and Chandler’s talk (which is followed by a Spectre Panel) is very informative.
This is a problem that exists in almost all CPUs on the market, including those from Intel, ARM, AMD and IBM. Luckily, it seems that the good people found this first and patches for hardware and mitigation guidance for software developers is available.
If you watch no other talk then this is the one to watch!
Editor: Julia Commons
Illustrator: Michelle Hird
