Afterwood

I don’t know if it was a New Year’s resolution to resurrect the ACCU Cambridge meet-up, but 2025 will start with exactly that happening, as organiser Phil Nash kicks off the reboot with his own talk about the past, present, and future state of C++. Now that I’m working remotely practically full-time, having an ACCU meet-up in my neck of the woods is most welcome. A lawyer might argue that the pre-reboot social at a pub in Cambridge just before Christmas was the real reboot event, but January sees the actual return of the traditional format – a talk, book-ended with some socialising/networking.

The ACCU Cambridge meet-up holds a special place in my heart as it was the first meet-up I ever attended. Way back in late 2007 (not long after I joined ACCU) Jez Higgins gave an amusingly titled talk, ‘Iteration: It’s just one damn thing after another’. Up until that point, my only real sources of learning about the craft of programming were books, dedicated printed magazines such as Dr Dobbs, C++ Report, MSJ, etc. and – increasingly – articles on the Internet, such as the Artima Weblogs (sic).

Whichever way you look at it, it was all about the written word – a very solitary and passive experience. Sure, I talked with colleagues in the office, and we shared views on the best written content we came across, though primarily when it had practical implications for the kinds of systems we were building. When you’re young and all working for the same company for a long time, it can create a form of echo chamber. Unless fresh blood joins the ranks and brings in experiences from farther afield – other cultures and industries – there is a danger of groupthink setting in, which is neither optimal for the employer or employee.

It would be easy to go along to the meet-up, listen to the presentation, and then leave; all without saying a word to anyone else. But then this would be no different to reading the transcript or watching the video later (not that that was really even an option back then). What I found most enjoyable from that meet-up experience was the interactivity, both with the speaker and the other attendees. Being Cambridge, there were a number of people from the embedded arena, a sector with very different constraints to those I’d personally experienced in a professional capacity. (Writing assembly language in your bedroom as a teenager might give you some technical empathy but does not prepare you for the commercial pressures of real-world software development.)

One consequence of that experience, and those meet-ups which followed, was that I attended my first ACCU Conference the following year in 2008. This was almost like back-to-back meet-ups, but where you also shared breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the other attendees too. I didn’t write a review of my 2008 conference experience, mostly because I wasn’t into writing back then (in fact, I abhorred it). However, Steve Love (amongst others), clearly helped me overcome my shyness a year later and I concluded my 2009 ACCU Conference review for CVu with “I know it’s only my second year, but it lost none of the magic I experienced last year.” Words to that effect appear to be my closing remark on my five subsequent ACCU conference reviews for CVu too.

Over 15 years later and I still find attending meet-ups and conferences a hugely enjoyable part of my learning process, whether hosted by ACCU or otherwise. Conferences in particular have provided a level of diversity of content that I might not have been exposed to if each session had been a separate article, book, or meet-up to attend. A conference allows you to leverage the locality of reference and amortise the cost of each session across the whole event, making it cheaper to step outside your comfort zone and attend talks which may not directly influence your current role, but could well contribute to your overall well-roundedness as a programmer. On some occasions an over-subscribed talk forced me to seek refuge elsewhere and I have subsequently been enlightened by a topic I didn’t even know existed. I’ve never written a line of Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Lisp, or Haskell in my life, either professionally or for fun, but spending 45 to 90 minutes watching a talk on them moved those subjects (and related concepts) from the level of ‘unconscious incompetence’ to ‘conscious incompetence’.

Naturally, The Four Stages of Competence is a learning model I first heard about through a meet-up, and the meta subject of ‘learning about learning’ usually makes one or two appearances at the meet-ups and conferences that cover a wider spectrum of programming topics than at ones focusing on a single technology. While I remember soaking up everything I could about C++ during those first few ACCU conferences (because it was my bread-and-butter) I purposefully attended talks about testing, databases, system’s thinking, requirements analysis, architecture, etc. to help add colour to the craft that I knew I’d probably have to embrace anyway at some point in my career, even if I wanted to remain a hands-on software developer. (Conference keynotes can fill this void to some extent too, when used effectively, but it’s becoming more common for them to remain technical, which I believe is a lost opportunity.)

For most of us, collaboration plays a significant role in our daily lives, and being able to communicate ideas well to a variety of stakeholders, whether they be customers, management, operations, testers, fellow developers, etc. makes us more productive if we can anticipate their problems ahead of time – to some degree – because we have an appreciation for their discipline too. Socialising with other people in a dedicated learning environment allows you to explore that without the pressure of the business setting biasing the conversation.

Even if you do choose to stick with what you know best and only attend events for your technology stack of choice, you’ll still be greeted with an endless supply of interactive programming war stories to prepare you for the future, ones that you’d rarely get from reading incident post mortems or The Daily WTF. Plus, meeting some of your favourite authors and contributors can do wonders for confronting your Imposter Syndrome as you realise they’re all mere mortals and don’t, in fact, know everything there is to know about everything.

Chris Oldwood is a freelance programmer who started out as a bedroom coder in the 80s writing assembler on 8-bit micros. These days it’s enterprise grade technology from plush corporate offices the comfort of his breakfast bar. He has resumed commentating on the Godmanchester duck race but continues to be easily distracted by emails and DMs.