CppNorth, The Canadian C++ Conference 2025

Master the art of confident communication to showcase your value and unlock new career opportunities. This session offers practical tools to help you overcome self-doubt, articulate your achievements, and build influence through authentic, clear communication. Gain the confidence to navigate workplace dynamics and take charge of your professional growth.

A good technical talk is as much about storytelling as it is about presenting information. At best, it is a shared experience between speaker and audience. Even the most complex topics can be presented simply and clearly, sparking questions, conversation, and perhaps even some argument. When this is done well, a good talk becomes a great one and leaves everyone, including the speakers, with more: more understanding, more curiosity, more interest.
Small tweaks to your presentations can make a huge difference. Learn how to add context and clarity to your talks; how much detail is enough; how to craft simple and effective slides; how to be truly comfortable on stage and engage your audience; and how to cope with the unexpected.

I envision much of this as a conversation with the audience where they can discuss their own ideas or works in progress if they choose; share experiences, find presentation ideas from the work they are doing day to day.

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.

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.

Every few years, someone will proudly declare they have an idea or technology that will replace expensive software engineers (or at least make us less expensive). These include everything from early programming languages such as Fortran and Cobol, WYSIWYG editors, diagram-based programming, modern programming languages such as TypeScript, and, most recently, AI coding tools. So far, these innovations have helped developers by abstracting away time consuming and repetitive tasks, which has made us more efficient, more specialized, and has allowed us to build increasingly complex systems. This talk will explore the history of technologies that were supposed to make us obsolete, how they’ve actually helped us, and why we’re so hard to replace.