ACCU Autumn 2019

This Autumn, on November the 11th and 12th, we will see the biggest deep tech event of the year in Belfast: ACCU Autumn 2019 — with some of the biggest names in programming in town for two days and three intense tracks of top quality talks. If you are a developer you'll want to be there! The conference will be held in the Hilton Hotel in the waterfront part of the city.

The ACCU Autumn conference is a new conference which aims to build on the popularity of the annual Spring ACCU conference but with an aspirational theme of "the evolution of programming".

As such the ACCU Autumn conference won’t be about any one technology or language, but rather a celebration of the diversity and richness of the wider programming and development languages, communities and ecosystems that exist today, and will exist tomorrow.

That's not to say the conference will be high level or superficial. Not at all. In the tradition of the long running ACCU conference this will be a highly rewarding deep tech event where you're guaranteed to learn something new, and come away energised and inspired!

So what can you expect from the conference?

Well, the goals of the conference are to ensure all delegates will:

1 - have an opportunity to hear deep technical talks from industry experts

2 - gain valuable exposure to new language and development directions

3 - improve their understanding of people, team, business and organisational trends

As this is the first year we are running the conference we have a slightly reduced schedule, and so the first two goals gain the majority of attention. Achieving the third goal will need to be fed through the sharing of experiences outside of the scheduled sessions! We aim to address that for next year and already have some strong speakers lined up.

Can you tell me about some of the sessions?

Sure. The current full schedule is already available but here are a couple of highlights:

• Introduction to Cache Oblivious Algorithms - learn how to build algorithms that are cache oblivious, that is, they perform better across disparate hardware (cache) architectures in the average case than those optimised for any specific hardware architecture.

• Make your programs more reliable with Fuzzing - learn how to use fuzzing as an effective technique for significantly increasing the surface area of tests, improving security of code, and notably addressing the problem of "outside data".

• The Truth of a Procedure - learn how we can consider procedures and their interfaces to be sentences and how this jump in interpretation facilitates reasoning about procedures in terms of provable logic.

• No more secrets? Why your secrets aren’t safe and what you can do about it - learn how quantum computing will change how we reason about and address security in our systems.

to mention only a few, with well known names in the industry such as:

• Herb Sutter (Microsoft) author of the famous The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software talk that has inspired the evolution of language design and development techniques over the past decade.

• John Lakos (Bloomberg) author of the seminal Large Scale C++ System Design book (new edition on its way!) that informed not just the C++ community, but has also influenced how large scale systems are reasoned about in every other language since.

• Lisa Lippincott, mathematician, architect, all-round language nerd, Lisa has been involved in the evolution of the C++ language for many years as well as being responsible for the architecture of many large scale systems out in the wild. She brings her unique perspective on how to map, usefully, many mathematical ideas into the programming domain.

• Titus Winters (Google) founder of Google's open source Abseil library that underpins more than 250M lines of Google code with 12K+ active internal users. As such Titus has extensive knowledge and experience of growing and maintaining huge, mission critical codebases.

I keep hearing about "WG21". What's that?

This year we are capitalising on the International Standards Organisation (ISO) C++ committee (WG21) holding their Autumn meeting in Belfast the week before the ACCU Autumn conference (4th to 9th November). With the biggest names in the C++ world, and some of the biggest names in programming in general, all in Belfast, we will see many of them stay on to attend and speak at the conference, ensuring the programme is of the highest quality.

This also means that this inaugural year there will a large proportion of talks whose language of reference is C++, but we've also made sure there is at least one track in every time slot with a language agnostic or polyglot talk that will appeal to all developers!

Sounds great!!

Registration is open so please sign up now to attend, and close the year with a fantastic opportunity to refresh your perspective, learn something new and expand your community!

Can my company sponsor the event?

Certainly, there are still opportunities to sponsor the event. Sponsoring ACCU Autumn, or WG21, or both is probably the most cost effective way to differentiate and help raise your recruitment profile. It's also a highly visible way to demonstrate to your employees that you consider their growth and development to be important to you. Join the ranks of companies like Microsoft who recently confirmed platinum sponsorship of both events.

So download the sponsorship pack and get in touch! If you don't see something in the pack to suit your required level of exposure, or that meets your budget please reach out through the contact links in the pack and we'll talk through your options.

See you at ACCU Autumn!

— Jamie (ACCU Autumn Conference chair)