CppNorth, The Canadian C++ Conference 2025

TBA

Get ready for a crazy fun & informative talk! Boost your C++ code's performance by utilizing the full power of your computer’s built-in cache. In this talk, we'll delve into the basics of caches, spatial and temporal cache locality, and practical techniques for optimizing cache access. We'll also explore cache prefetching, branch prediction, and false sharing, providing examples modelled on real-world production code and performance benchmarks to drive home each point. By the end of this talk, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to better optimize your code for cross-platform performance gains.

In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, innovation thrives where diversity and creativity intersect. This talk explores the unique synergy between code and culture, revealing how diverse perspectives amplify problem-solving, foster creativity, and drive groundbreaking advancements. We'll dive into real-world examples and research that demonstrate how inclusive teams leverage varied experiences, viewpoints, and skills to craft solutions that resonate globally. Attendees will gain insights into how cultivating a culture of diversity not only enhances team dynamics but also fuels sustainable & impactful innovation. Join me to uncover how diversity in tech isn’t just a value—it’s a vital component of building the future.

Recognizing objects in real-world situations, especially on mobile devices with limited resources or in areas with poor internet connectivity, can be a significant challenge. This talk presents a C++ application for real-time landmine detection, focusing on the Android deployment and its ability to perform on-device detection.

The application, built with the Qt framework written in C++, is designed for both offline (on-device) and online (cloud-connected) operation, balancing performance, accuracy, and connectivity constraints. The Android deployment utilizes the Qt JNI (Java Native Interface) to interact with an ONNX Runtime-based inference engine running in a Java environment, as well as accessing native Android APIs for tasks requiring on-device processing, such as file I/O, thumbnail generation, and network connectivity checks. We will discuss the challenges and solutions involved, including data marshalling between C++ and Java (image format conversion and bounding box result processing), and accessing native Android functionalities from C++. The presentation will include simplified code examples that illustrate these critical integration points.

By the end of the talk, attendees will gain a practical understanding of how to communicate between C++ and Java using JNI, integrate pre-trained deep learning models into their C++ applications, evaluate the trade-offs between on-device and cloud-based processing, and address performance considerations for real-time object detection on Android.

Many individual contributors professionals are choosing to create their careers off-road. Instead of climbing the standard career ladder to and through management, they are choosing to navigate tech careers one project and one team at a time. Such professionals often show their leadership without titles, relying instead on creativity, curiosity, and empathy toward their colleagues.

This panel featuring a group of four engineers who have mapped out their careers as individual contributors is designed as a conversation with our audience, a way to encourage others to understand what is possible. Each panelist has learned to stretch beyond assignments while sharing the day-to-day load on their teams. The panel will also include a manager who leads by trusting his people and providing structure when it is requested. One of the panelists spent some hours interviewing other managers, so they can speak with authority about how they balance a team with strongly self-led individuals.

We believe this discussion can help both managers and individual contributors find balance between team needs and individual growth; to navigate the cultures within their organizations; and understand the value that is derived from professional freedom with intent.

While we all work together now, each of us has worked at other companies and in other circumstances where we thrived mainly because we were able to balance autonomy with a deep sense of collaboration and adventure.