Epochs, Best-Practices and Cross Platform Security

This month we're excited to be hosted by another new venue, Garrison, who will be providing pizza and drink as well as the event space.

And we have a packed schedule, with three speakers: David Bailey, Jarl Ostensen and Vittorio Romeo!

Agenda:

19:00 Phil Nash, "Intro and news"

19:10 Jarl Ostensen, "Finding the balance; lessons learned for best C and C++ practices in a live production code base"

Polystream's IP is its technology and this has evolved over the last few years from relatively straight C owned by a very limited number of people, through to something much more C++'ified developed by a larger team.
The code is heavily optimised for performance and the complexity of the IP adds strict requirements on maintainability and scalability under different conditions.
As we have grown the team and the scope of the technology challenges, we have gone through a number of iterations of refactoring building on lessons learned at each step, and have converged on a pragmatic mix of C and C++ practices.
This talk is about our journey so far, developing and refining our code base and approaches, wrong turns and good decisions alike

20:00 break

20:15 David Bailey, "C++ in a custom hardware, cross-platform security product"

Developing a complex enterprise cyber security product, involving custom hardware, FPGAs and a deep software tech stack involves many different trade-offs and decisions when it comes to language and platform support. At Garrison, we are users of C++ in multiple places in our stack - from embedded development, Android Open Source Project, browser development using Chromium, through to desktop and mobile applications. We don't live at the bleeding edge of the language, and indeed we have to live with constraints resulting from the hardware and vendors we use, and the range of platforms we have to support. We have to think long term - code we write now may be running in a data centre for the next 5-10 years. The aim of this short talk is to share how we use C++ in a multi-discipline, multi-platform environment and highlight some of the challenges and some of the solutions we've adopted in our engineering practice.

20:25 Vittorio Romeo, "Fixing C++ with Epochs"

21:00-ish - finish

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About the speakers

Jarl is the Director of Engineering for Streamer Technology at Polystream, leading the research and delivery behind Polystream’s unique streaming technology. Prior to joining Polystream in 2016, Jarl lead the Service and Technology organisation at Microsoft’s Lionhead Studios, lead Mobile Technology at Supermassive, and has helped deliver many great and successful games at Electronic Arts, all the way back to working at the fabled Bullfrog Studios, creators of Theme Park World and the Dungeon Keeper series.

Dave Bailey is the Chief Engineer at Garrison Technology, and formerly the lead engineer in BAE Systems Cyber Security business, known for an extensive track record of delivering complex technical projects.

Much of Dave’s experience has been in hands-on development and project management of operational (24/7) systems that require tight integration between hardware and software systems. These projects have ranged from accelerating exotic financial trades by many factors, supporting submarine missions and developing one of the world’s first behavioural cyber security monitoring solutions.

Vittorio Romeo (B.Sc. Computer Science) has been a Software Engineer at Bloomberg for > 3 years, working on mission-critical company C++ infrastructure and providing Modern C++ training to hundreds of fellow employees.

Vittorio has created several open-source C++ libraries and games, published many video courses and tutorials, and actively participates in the ISO C++ standardization process. He has presented more than 20 times at international C++ conferences.

When he’s not writing code, Vittorio enjoys weightlifting and fitness-related activities, competitive/challenging computer gaming and sci-fi movies/TV-series.