Austin C/C++ Meetup in Peril?!

As many of you may already be aware, the sponsor of our Meetup, John "Smithy" Carlson, of Smithy Jr's Bail Bonds fame, was recently arrested after allegedly holding the employees of a Little Caesar's pizza at gunpoint with an assault rifle when they told him it would take ten minutes to prepare his "hot and ready" pepperoni pizza.

Anyone who knows Smithy knows he's a fan of three things: Little Caesar's $5 pizzas, the raw performance and beauty of the C and C++ programming languages, and our criminal justice system's ruthless tendency to siphon money from the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. While some of Smithy's numerous critics in the local Austin technical community may accuse him of once-again being led astray by his focus on premature optimizations, the fact remains that no Little Caesar's franchise location worth its salt should make a customer, let alone one as loyal and outstanding a citizen as Smithy, wait ten minutes for a food item specifically advertised as "hot and ready." I look forward to seeing this mockery of justice ended and the charges against Mr. Carlson dropped.

Sadly, with our sponsor gone, I fear I may have to shutter the meetup after a decade and a half of servicing this community. I'd like to thank Matt Weigel for founding this meetup back 2006, as well as Brian Dickens for sprucing up the site, and bequeathing me the box of magic cubes and inventing many of the rituals used at our pub socials. Shout out as well to David Cravey for helping me co-manage the group online and deal with incoming membership requests. Additionally my former employer Rackspace will forever have my gratitude for hosting almost all of our technical presentations. The Austin office may be closed forever, but a part of my heart will forever be in the Willie Nelson conference room.

Thanks also to the amazingly talented people who gave technical presentations over the years. You helped the community learn, and were great ambassadors to the C and C++ language as well as the Austin technical community in general. Thanks also to the audience for always being so quick to participate - the back and forth was amazing. We shut that building down almost every time and typically had parking lot discussions that lasted past midnight.

I'd also like to thank John Carlson and all our prior sponsors such as GlobalScape, Ultra Basic, Joey's Pest N' Lawn, Midnight C++, and Hill Country Fair Pink Drink for their financial support over the years. Thanks also to Meetup.com for doing their part to help out during a global pandemic where no one could congregate without spreading a deadly disease by allowing us to continue paying the regular price of $200 a year to use this site.

If you have a desire to meet members of your local C/C++ community fear not, as Grant Rosig's C++ 20 Interactive Q&A study group(https://www.meetup.com/cppmsg/) continues to meet over zoom and is an excellent resource for people wishing to learn or refine their knowledge in C++. There's also the Austin LLVM meetup which will hopefully be meeting again one day. I attended one of their meetups back in 2019 and found it to be excellent.

Furthermore the landscape of C++ resources has changed immensely over the past ten years:

• There's CppCast, the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. These guys know their stuff and honestly listening to it keeps me close to as plugged in as picking the brains of the local C++ community used to.
• There's the official ISO C/C++ website (https://isocpp.org/)
• There's the CppCon (https://cppcon.org/) and CppNow (https://cppnow.org/) conferences. While both charge a fee, they waive it for volunteers as well as for speakers. More importantly both put all presentations from each conference on YouTube. If you're browsing this page because you're curious about C++ and want to catch up on it I highly recommend you spend a few evenings watching the most recent keynotes from CppCon.
• The C++ Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/) can be pretty OK

If anyone from the Python meetup asks about us, tell them we're still meeting at the Rackspace Austin office once a month, and that this isn't a loss - it's a indefinite tie.

Actually on second thought tell them we meet at the Capital Factory, and every night the sponsors lay out free Homeslice Pizza and beers.

I'll miss you all.

Be well,

Tim