Accidentily celebrating 13 years of Meeting C++ with Jason Turner

published at 27.06.2025 22:45 by Jens Weller
Save to Instapaper Pocket

Today, on the 27th June is the date where Meeting C++ went live with the first announcement about the conference in 2012.

In the weeks leading up to the end of June in 2012 lots of preparations had to be made, and after the announcement lots of new contacts came forward with ideas for the conference. One of the first was Rainer Grimm, with whom I've exchanged a few emails. I remember that Rainer had some speaker specific questions - which where then settled thanks to him asking. Rainer Grimm is also the one speaker that has spoken on every edition of Meeting C++! For the recent years he has been a supporter of the online track, as due to his ALS diagnosis he was not able to travel in recent years. So Rainer is again part of the online track of this years conference.

Earlier this year Jason Turner announced his plan to walk the pieterpad: "Inspired by Rainer Grimm's ALS journey, I'm pledging 1 euro for each km logged (~500) donation to ALS research.". This was a nice surprise, and made me wonder if this was a potential opportunity to meet up with Jason. As he is an old conference friend of mine, but I've seen him in 2019 the last time due to not traveling for a while. But when I checked the map of the pieterpad, I was surprised that the path actually came quite close to where I live. In fact, it goes right through the woods I regulary hike in. The part that goes from Venlo to Swalmen/Roermond follows the dutch/german border and then goes through some of the local Grenzwald ("Borderforest") in Germany. This made me think about how to do this, joining the full 23 km from Venlo to Swalmen is a little long and not very practical. Instead I've decided to meetup at a local hut in the woods, and walk with Jason for about 7km, and then back, 14km in total.

And this is where we've met up two weeks ago on Friday the 13th, when Jason and his wife Jen were on the path from Venlo to Swalmen. The hottest day of the year. When I started walking towards our meeting point I saw a notification from Twitter that today was my anniversary for @meetingcpp, 13 years. I found this funny, and we did talk a bit about Meeting C++, but mostly I tried to listen to what they had to tell about walking the path and all the other things. We've could have spend more time, but it was very hot which made it difficult to find a good place to sit around and talk plus doing so would have meant to walk through even more heat. And thats how the plan to meetup with an old friend accidently also turned into a celebration of 13 years of Meeting C++.

One thing we've also talked about was our friend Rainer Grimm. I've visited Rainer in May, so I could tell from his new wheel chair and how he is looking forward to write a book on C++26. This also brought us to talk about ALS and Jasons motivation to walk the path and that he pledged to donate 1 €/$ per km walked to ALS research, and that he wants to motivate others to do the same for their local ALS organizations. So I plan to match Jasons 500 €/$ donation, and will likely donate to the ALS Ambulance of the Charité. 

I usually hike alone and do photography, so it was a nice change and chance to meetup with Jason and Jen. Due to the heat our time to hang out was limited, but it was a very nice day. Also kudos for hiking 500+ km through the woods in such a short time.

And Meeting C++ will now continue into its 14th year, I've just released a first version of this years schedule. Join us in Berlin or online to learn and celebrate C++ once again!

Join the Meeting C++ patreon community!
This and other posts on Meeting C++ are enabled by my supporters on patreon!