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Day 3 Closing Notes

Fri, 17 May 2024 17:00:00 +0100

Conference ends.

Maintaining Your Love For Passion Projects

Fri, 17 May 2024 16:00:00 +0100

Have you ever lost interest in a passion project?

Watch out for drains on your enthusiasm and learn to set boundaries to protect yourself and ultimately benefit the world with better software. This is my story writing what would become the most popular unzip implementation in JavaScript, losing interest in the project, and then regaining interest after a 4 year hiatus. What went wrong and what was necessary to get back into it?

Maps and Yellow Pages

Fri, 17 May 2024 15:00:00 +0100

If you look back 10-15 years, we used “free maps” only as a last-resort way to find a tourism information office or shop that sells real maps. It also used to be funny and, in a way, interesting, to navigate “map-flavored yellow pages”. We knew we are looking at an ad brochure and acted accordingly.

These days map-flavored Yellow Pages are embedded into every smartphone, which we use daily to navigate. I find it quite sad, because constantly projecting the world through such “maps” results in a very peculiar world understanding. For those who haven’t tried, it is an interesting exercise to use Yellow Pages to find playgrounds (when traveling with kids) or water fountains during hot days.

Types and other techniques as an accessibility tool for the ADHD brain

Fri, 17 May 2024 14:00:00 +0100

Programmers love claiming that certain tools and techniques are “better”, and trying to justify their objective superiority. From static type systems to test driven development we look for scientific studies to back our views while trying to win the argument about which direction is “correct”.

After more than 10 years as a developer, software architect, and trainer, Michael was diagnosed with ADHD. As he started researching what that meant, he realized that many of his own preferences directly countered the known weaknesses common to those with ADHD. He hadn’t been “following the science” of effective software development - he’d been unconsciously selecting his own accessibility tooling.

Step back, Dive deep: Finding Insight through breadth and depth

Fri, 17 May 2024 11:30:00 +0100

All technological breakthroughs are made because of some insight. Steam power was inspired by insight from the kitchen, chemical structures were discovered through insights from theology, and mathematics is driven by insight, from within and without. Computers and software are much the same.

This talk explores various breakthroughs in computing and the insights that led to them. We see that some of these insights come from studying the problem deeply, breaking or modifying the models and abstractions that have been established. Other insights come from studying other unrelated fields, and drawing insight that can then be applied.

Abstract Factories, Zygomorphisms, and You: The Role of Social Interaction in Language Ecosystems

Fri, 17 May 2024 10:30:00 +0100

In linguistics, the relation between language and thought is a debated topic. Linguistic relativity is a contentious principle, suggesting that the language you speak influences your worldview and cognition. One of the reasons why it is controversial is that other factors play roles in shaping thought, such as social norms and constructs.

Programming languages are obviously different from spoken languages in a number of ways, but a common recurring topic in the developer community is that programming languages do shape the way we think about programs. But is it really the language, or is it the way this language is most commonly used? What role do the ecosystem and the implied social norms play in that process? What makes a Java program a “Java” program? What makes Go software “Go” software? What about Rust, Scala, Zig?

Biodigital Jazz!

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:30:00 +0100

On the intersection of software, art (and business) at TigerBeetle.

Day 3 Welcome

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:15:00 +0100

Registration Opens

Fri, 17 May 2024 08:45:00 +0100

Come get your badge!

Your Stripe receipt is the only proof of payment required.

If you arrive late, find somebody with a STAFF badge. Also feel free to ask in the SYCL Discord server for help (in #sycl24-main).

NOTE: this is a talk day, which means that the main organizers will be busy running the livestream. Try to make it on time otherwise it might take a moment before we’re able to get you a badge.

Day 2 Closing Notes

Thu, 16 May 2024 17:00:00 +0100

Day 2 ends.

Defeating the Optimizer: How to Write (and avoid) Unoptimizable Code

Thu, 16 May 2024 16:00:00 +0100

Systems languages use optimizing compilers to emit efficient code. Despite being ubiquitous, these optimizers are often treated like black boxes by programmers. It is easy to imagine optimizations that the compiler could do, but without a solid understanding programmers often make easily-fixed mistakes that prevent the optimizer from doing a good job.

This talk will go through a number of examples of these mistakes. We’ll look at code which is easily optimized by humans but cannot possibly be optimized by the most powerful compiler. We’ll discuss heuristics for estimating what the optimizer might do, methods for verifying what the optimizer actually does, and how to identify things the optimizer definitely cannot do.

Nea: A webserver that never allocates

Thu, 16 May 2024 15:00:00 +0100

Nea is a Roc platform for building web servers with some special characteristics: after initialization, its memory use is constant, no matter the amount of traffic.

The amount of memory used per-request (and therefore the number of concurrent requests) is fixed. This means that performance is very predictable and requests that exceed the memory budget can fail gracefully. Of course there are limitations too.

We’ll explore some Rust that is so unsafe even an unsafe block cannot handle it, writing async executors, using custom allocators, jumping up and down the stack with inline assembly, and how we can use low-level primitives to create rock- solid guarantees and high-quality user experiences.

A Python command line parser you can love

Thu, 16 May 2024 14:00:00 +0100

The behaviour of most programs, even those normally used via their GUI, can be changed by starting the program with some arguments, usually from the command line.

The interpretation of these arguments, command line (argument) parsing, is up to the program, but various libraries exist that provide both a standardised way of interpreting these arguments, as well as extra functionality, such as generation of nicely formatter help information.

In this talk I will first provide some terminology and give a examples of different assumptions in command line parsing, focussing on Unix utilities. I will describe how these influenced the standard library routines getopt, optparse and argparse, focussing on the latter and comparing that with alternatives such as click and docopt. Some of these libraries and enhancements thereof re-use, and extend, already specified information, such as function/method arguments.

Linking can be fast (if you cheat): Roc's Surgical Linker

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:30:00 +0100

Recently, there have been a lot of cool developments in linking. From lld improvements to mold and even the zig linker, linkers have been getting better. That said, even fast linkers can significantly slowdown your feedback loop.

During software development, we strive for feedback loops that are as fast as interpreted languages. Roc’s surgical linker is one piece in this puzzle, enabling linking that is bottlenecked by the time it takes to write an executable to disk.

Data-Oriented Design Revisited: Type Safety in the Zig Compiler

Thu, 16 May 2024 10:30:00 +0100

Data-Oriented Design seeks to optimise the memory footprint and access patterns of software with the goal of improving performance.

Unfortunately, common DOD strategies involve flattening lots of data to raw integers, so can often come at the cost of type safety. Using the Zig compiler codebase, we walk through how our DOD implementation techniques have evolved over the past two years to improve efficiency without sacrificing type safety.

Hybrid-Level Programming

Thu, 16 May 2024 09:30:00 +0100

It’s possible to spend an entire programming career doing exclusively high-level programming, never interacting directly with OS APIs or anything closer to the metal. For awhile I assumed that’s how my career would go, and I had a mental model of lower-level programming as existing in a different world – where people (wizards, perhaps) worked on completely different categories of problems from what the rest of us did in the land of garbage collection.

Day 2 Welcome

Thu, 16 May 2024 09:15:00 +0100

Registation Opens

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:45:00 +0100

Come get your badge! You only need to do this once. To access the event in subsequent days you just need to show your paper badge.

Your Stripe receipt is the only proof of payment required.

If you arrive late, find somebody with a STAFF badge. Also feel free to ask in the SYCL Discord server for help (in #sycl24-main).

NOTE: this is a talk day, which means that the main organizers will be busy running the livestream. Try to make it on time otherwise it might take a moment before we’re able to get you a badge.

Registration Opens

Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:00 +0100

Come get your badge! You only need to do this once. To access the event in subsequent days you just need to show your paper badge.

Your Stripe receipt is the only proof of payment required.

If you arrive late, find somebody with a STAFF badge. Also feel free to ask in the SYCL Discord server for help (in #sycl24-main).

Intro to 2D Gamedev with Mach Engine

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:30:00 +0100

Description

In this introduction to 2D gamedev, we’ll cover everything you need to make simple 2D games in Zig using Mach!

No previous gamedev experience is required. In the morning 2-hour session we’ll briefly touch on the basics and more intermediate concepts:

Introduction to modern graphics APIs
What shaders are and how to work with them
2D sprite rendering
Audio rendering
Working with an entity component system
Connecting the pieces together

Then after a casual break for lunch, we’ll have more learning and open development time for working on your own 2D game.

Learn How to Build C/C++ Projects with Zig

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:30:00 +0100

Introduction

Zig is not only a C/C++ cross-compiler, but also a full-fledged toolchain that can build all kinds of C/C++ projects. This is thanks to the fact that Zig bundles all the required tools (from target libcs to build tools like ar) and also thanks to the Zig build system which is capable of handling all kinds of C/C++ projects.

By adopting Zig as your compiler and build system you won’t need to depend anymore on make, cmake, etc. Additionally you will be able to add support for cross-compilation to your projects and, if desired, to leverage the Zig package manager for fetching dependencies.

Registration Opens

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:00:00 +0100

Come get your badge! You only need to do this once, in subsequent days all you have to do is show your paper badge.

Your Stripe receipt is the only proof of payment required. NOTE: Workshops have a separate ticket!

If you arrive late, find somebody with a STAFF badge. Also feel free to ask in the SYCL Discord server for help (in #sycl24-main).

Call For Speakers

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0100

All Calls for Speakers will close on April 3, 2024 at 23:59 UTC.

Preface

Thank you for your interest in speaking at Software You Can Love.

The deadline for submitting applications is April 3, 2024 at 23:59 UTC. You are free to apply to both day of talks. You can also apply more than once to each track, but we kindly ask all applicants to each submit no more than 4 talks in total.

Discord Server

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:47:11 +0100

Discord Server

The conference will use the Zig SHOWTIME Discord server, where you will find a section dedicated to SYCL.

You can learn more about the relationship between SYCL and Zig SHOWTIME in the about section.

Invite Link

What will the server be used for?

Before the event, it will be used to have people introduce themselves and to answer questions about travel.

Travel FAQs

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:47:11 +0100

Do I really need to join the Discord server?

Kinda. This is where attendees initially get to know each other, where recommendations for hotels are shared, and where official announcements from the organizers are shared.

Italy Travel Ideas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

In this page you will find some places that you can visit as part of your trip to Italy.

One way you can make the most of your trip is to get a return ticket that leaves from a different city than Milan.

Success!

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your ticket purchase was successful!

You should have already received a receipt from Stripe. We will contact you soon at the provided email address to ask you any missing detail in order to emit an electronic invoice.

If you wish to speed-up this process please contact us at loris@sycl.it with all the required information.

At the event the attendee(s) will be asked to show the Stripe receipt as proof of purchase.

Success!

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your ticket purchase was successful!

You should have already received a receipt from Stripe. Unlike previous years, you will not receive any other confirmation email from us.

At the event you will be asked to show your Stripe receipt as proof of purchase.

Note that unless something bad happens (eg the conference gets canceled), we will not contact you by email anymore, so if you want to keep up to date with ordinary news and meet other attendees, join the Discord server, which is also highly recommended in order to get help planning your trip to Italy.