CppCon 2021 starts in just a few days! As in 2019 and 2020, CppCon 2021 will have a “Back to Basics” track. The Back to Basics track’s mission (in phrasing newly refined for 2021) is: Top trainers clearly explain all the essential topics of modern C++.

Each session in the track is about a single concrete topic, often expressible in just one or two words: Pointers. Templates. Lambdas. One way I justify this naming scheme is to picture an imaginary attendee. They are conscious of having only a tenuous understanding of foo. So they attend the talk titled “Back to Basics: Foo,” and (if the talk is intelligible to them) they’ll leave the room with a reasonable working knowledge of foo.

Each session in the track is presented by an expert instructor. We aim to get presenters who are not only experts on the technical material, but also experts at presentation and instruction.

Each session aims to present time-tested guidelines that are aligned with mainstream C++ and broadly useful across many industries. We fit these sessions together like jigsaw pieces to produce a track that covers “everything you need to know” to be a working programmer in today’s C++ community.

The Back to Basics track is part of the main conference program. You don’t need any special ticket to attend any of the track’s talks. You can freely mix B2B talks with non-B2B talks in your schedule. Finally, the B2B track will be recorded and captioned and put up on YouTube with the rest of the main program.

Here’s this year’s Back to Basics lineup. Notice that it’s not really in any sensible order this year — to the extent that we have one talk scheduled after the track’s “closing keynote” — and it’s heavily weighted toward the beginning of the week. None of this scheduling originates with me! It was largely an artifact of this year’s “hybrid” conference model: some speakers require certain timeslots because they’re speaking remotely, and the whole schedule is somewhat front-loaded so that if there are last-minute technical difficulties with a session we can reschedule it for later in the week.

My understanding is that, for the sessions I’ve marked “online,” there will not be any designated way for in-person attendees to watch those talks (except ad-hoc via the hotel wifi). Vice versa, all of the unmarked sessions will be in-person and live-streamed to online attendees; except for Mike Shah’s “Concurrency,” which will not be live-streamed but will be re-broadcast about 20 hours later for the online attendees.

All times are Denver time.

Monday, 2021-10-25

11:00 am. Amir Kirsh: “Understanding and Mastering C++’s Complexity.”

12:30 pm. Klaus Iglberger: “Designing Classes, Part 1.” This is an online session.

2:00 pm. Klaus Iglberger: “Designing Classes, Part 2.” This is an online session.

3:15 pm. Mike Shah: “Pointers.”

4:45 pm. Mike Shah: “Concurrency.” This session is in-person, but will be re-broadcast online on Tuesday.

Tuesday, 2021-10-26

7:45 am. Nico Josuttis: “Move Semantics.” This is an online session.

9:00 am. Ansel Sermersheim and Barbara Geller: “Overload Resolution.”

10:30 am. Rainer Grimm: “const and constexpr.” This is an online session.

12:30 pm. Mike Shah: “Concurrency (online Q&A).” This is an online session, reprising Mike’s talk from Monday.

2:00 pm. Bob Steagall: “Templates, Part 1.”

3:15 pm. Bob Steagall: “Templates, Part 2.”

Wednesday, 2021-10-27

7:45 am. Klaus Iglberger: “The Special Member Functions.” This is an online session.

9:00 am. Ansel Sermersheim and Barbara Geller: “Undefined Behavior.”

10:30 am. Rainer Grimm. “Object-Oriented Programming.” This is an online session.

12:30 pm. Nico Josuttis. “Lambdas.” This is an online session.

2:00 pm. Bob Steagall. “Classic STL.”

3:15 pm. Brian Ruth. “Casting.”

Thursday, 2021-10-28

9:00 am. Bob Steagall: “Debugging Techniques.”

12:30 pm. Ben Saks: “Compiling and Linking.” This is an online session.

3:15 pm. Inbal Levi: “Smart Pointers and RAII.”

Friday, 2021-10-29

9:00 am. Marshall Clow: “Down the Rabbit Hole: An Exploration of Stack Overflow Questions.”

2:45 pm. Amir Kirsh and Adam Segoli Schubert: “Algorithmic Complexity.”

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Previously on this blog:

• “Back to Basics at CppCon 2019” (2019-09-12)

• “Back to Basics at CppCon 2020” (2020-08-11)

There are also now official “Back to Basics” playlists on the CppCon YouTube channel! 2019, 2020.