Pride Vibes 2017: Exeter Pride

Samathy from Stories by Samathy on Medium

Young people in Exeter’s Pride Parade

Pride Vibes: As a photographer for Gay Pride Pics, I attend lots of Prides across the UK every year. Each Pride has a different feel. This series will describe what each Pride was like and what the vibe of the pride was like.

The entire series is my opinion and mine only. Take it as you will. Note that this opinion comes from a 20 something extroverted transwoman who is herself a pride organiser.

I’m still working out what this series is going to be like. Bear with me.

Next: Birmingham Pride

My first Pride of the 2017 season was eagerly anticipated. The weather looked promising and the prospect of attending a Pride I hadn't yet visited was exciting.

Exeter Pride 2017 is the 9th Pride in the city, run by an experienced team.

The flag is lifted at the start of the parade

Exeter’s Pride parade starts off at a Church in the centre of the city.
I arrived and was greeted by a very friendly and seemingly super well organised set of volunteers and organisers.

Gathering for the start of the parade took place in the grounds of the church.

I was really happy to see tens of young people being hustled by the volunteers to carry the super long rainbow flag. It felt super welcoming to see so many people younger than myself happy to be carrying the flag through the city.

I noted the lack of corporate groups in the initial parade organising.
The church grounds were buzzing with excitement.

As well as young people featuring in the parade there were a suitable amount of costume wearing people too. I spotted someone in a horse mask, furries, dragged up people and the parade was lead by The Centurion.

A huge rainbow flag carried by mostly young people, onlookers watch.

The parade wound through the city, attracting hundreds of onlookers, most of which didn’t seem to have planned to see a parade that day.

The parade was a very happy affair, everyone in it was really pleased to be there.

There were no chants during the parade and very few groups taking advantage of the platform to use it for protest.
I wouldn’t say it was a ‘carnival’ parade since it was mostly people walking holding onto the flag, but it certainly was not a protest march.

The police marched in the parade, as did a group of Christian pastors.

The parade was just about the right length and generally felt like a really nice place to be. I think this was mainly because it was almost entirely young people marching for themselves and for Pride, rather than corporations and charitable organisations.

Exeter Pride was relaxed

The main event was an outdoor field affair with a single stage, and a fair amount of community and commercial stalls.

Being a completely free to attend event, Exeter Pride maintained the relaxed and welcoming feel that the parade exuded.

Mostly people found their spot on the sunny grass and stayed there all day.
The event felt very chill and very calm.

Although there were bars were not fenced in, there was not a huge amount of uncomfortably drunk people around. People seemed to be content with eating the great food and didn't need to go wild, even into the evening.

I was made really comfortable by the Chair of Exeter Pride delivering a speech on the main stage at the beginning of the event, he said, amongst other things:

‘Straight people are welcome here, but you’re our guests in our space, remember that’

as well as making sure to remind people that:

‘Although many of us have won our battles, there are still members of our community who face adversity every day.’

That really helped me to to feel welcome.

Exeter Pride attracted all kinds of people

The event was attended by lots of different people. Although it was certainly awash with white faces, we saw young people, older people and disabled people attending and having a great time.

Overall, Exeter Pride managed to create a very safe feeling happy Pride with a great community feel and welcoming atmosphere.

Great job, organising committee!!

Next in the Series: Birmingham Pride

Volunteers at Exeter Pride.

A Magical new World — Thoughts of a first time ACCU attendee.

Samathy from Stories by Samathy on Medium

I went to my first ACCU Conference last week. It was great.

ACCU Conference

I’d heard about ACCU from Russel Winder several months ago. He recommended I check out the conference (for which hes on the programme board) since I’m a fan and user of the C and C++ languages.

I arrived in Bristol on Tuesday excited for what the week held.

This post contains a section about the talks and a section about my experience at the bottom.

Be aware that some of the photos might not look as good on here as they should, I think Medium has compressed them a bit. All my photos should be online shortly.

The Talks

Russ Miles opens ACCU 2017

We started the conference proper with a fantastically explosive keynote delivered by Russ Miles who jumped on stage to deliver a programming parody of Highway to Hell accompanied by his own guitar playing.
His keynote was all about modern development and how most of a programmer’s tools currently just shout information at the programmer, rather than actually helping.

Later on the Wednesday I headed into a talk from Kevlin Henny that totally re-jigged how I think about concurrency. Thinking outside the Synchronisation Quadrant was wonderfully entertaining, with Kevlin excitedly bouncing across the floor.
A fantastically engaging speaker.

Lightning talks on Wednesday

Wednesday’s talks continued with several other good talks and a number of great lightning talks too.
Finalising with the welcome reception where delegates gathered in the hotel for drinks, food and conversation.

It was here that I really got the chance to socialise with a good few people, including Anna-Jayne and Beth, who I’d been excited about meeting since I found out they were going to be there!

Thursday began with an interesting keynote about the Chapel parallel programming language. The talk has encouraged me to try the language out and I’ll certainly be having a good play with that soon.

Peter Hilton’s Documentation for Developers workshop

Thursday’s stand out talks included Documentation for Developers workshop by Peter Hilton. I really enjoyed the workshoppy style that Peter used to deliver the talk. He got the audience working in groups, talking to each other and essentially complaining about documentation. He finished with suggesting a method of writing docs called Readme Driven Development as well as other suggestions.

The other talk on Thursday which I really loved was “The C++ Type System is your Friend”. Hubert Matthews was a great speaker with clear experience in explaining a complex topic in an easier to understand fashion.
I can’t say I understood everything, but I certainly liked listening to Hubert speak.

Thursday evening I headed out for dinner with Anna-Jayne and Beth before heading back to my accommodation to write up a last minute talk for Friday.

My talk was covering Intel Software Guard Extensions — Russel announced that there was an open slot on Friday for a 15 minute topic and I took the chance to speak then.

Friday began with a curious but thought provoking talk from Fran Buontempo called AI: Actual Intelligence.
I’m not entirely sure what the take away from the talk was intended to be, but nonetheless it was interesting!

Friday morning was full of 15 minute talks. A format I think is wonderful.
I really loved that amongst the 90 min talks throughout the rest of the week, there was time for these quick fire shorter talks too that were still serious technical talks (unlike the 5min lightning talks).

The talks I went to see were:

Odin Holmes talks about Named Parameters

At Friday lunch time I took part in a bit of an unplanned workshop on sketch noting with Michel Grootjans. It was essentially an hour of trying to make our notes prettier!
It was a lot of fun.

Sketch Noting with Michel Grootjans

Friday was the conference dinner — a rock themed night of fun and frivolities.

This was by far the high point of the conference for me.
It offered a great evening of meeting people and having a lot of fun.
I loved how everyone loosened up and spoke to anyone else there.

I met a whole bunch of people, and got on super well with a few people who I would like to consider friends now.

ACCU made it easy to get to know people too by forcing everyone who isn't a speaker to move tables between each meal course. Its a great idea!

Odin enjoys inflatable instruments

Saturday’s talks started with a really fun talk from Arjan van Leeuwen about string handling in C++1x. Covering the differences between char arrays and std::strings and how best to use them. As well as tantalising us with a C++17 feature called std::string_view (immutable views of a string).

Later I watched a talk from Anthony Williams and another from Odin, both of which went wildly over my head, but all the same I gained a few things from both of them.

Finishing off the conference was a brilliant keynote from renowned speaker and member of the ISO C++ standards committee Herb Sutter.

Herb Sutter on Metaclasses at ACCU 2017

Herb introduced a new feature of C++ that he may be proposing to the standards committee.
He described a feature allowing one to create meta-classes.

Essentially, one could describe a template of a class with certain interfaces, data and operators. Then, one could implement an instance of that class defining all the functionality of the class.
Its essentially a way to more cleanly describe something akin to inheritance with virtual functions.

I highly suggest you try to catch the talk, since it was so interesting that even an hour or so after the talk there was still quite a crowd of people gathered around Herb asking him questions.

Herb is surrounded by curious programmers

The Conference Environment

As a first time ACCU attendee — this wouldn't be a useful blog post without a few words about the environment at the conference.

As most of my readers know, I’m a young transwomen, so a safe and welcome environment is something that I very much appreciate and makes a huge difference to my experience of an event.

Its something thats super hard to achieve in a world like software development where the workforce are predominantly male.

I’m glad to say that ACCU did a great job of creating a safe and welcoming space. Despite being predominantly male as expected, everyone I encountered was not only friendly and helpful, but ever so willing to go out of their way to make me feel welcome and comfortable.
Everyone I met simply accepted me for me and didnt treat me any other way than friendly.

I would suggest that offering diversity tickets to ACCU would help make me feel even better there, since I’d feel better with a more diverse set of delegates.

I was especially comforted by Russel mentioning the code of conduct, without fail, every day of the conference. As well as one of the lightning talks being, delivered by a man, taking the form of a spoke word-ish piece praising the welcoming nature of ACCU and calling for the maintenance of the welcoming nature to all people in the community, not just people like himself.

I’d like to especially mention Julie and the Archer-Yates team for checking up on my happiness throughout the conference, they really helped me feel safe there.

I think there still could be work to do about making the conference a good place for younger adults — I was rather overwhelmed by the fact that everyone seemed older than me and clearly had a better idea of how to conduct themselves in the conference setting.
However, I think the only real way of solving this problem would be to make the conference easier to access to younger people (i,e cheaper tickets for students, its still super expensive) which wouldn't always be possible. Additionally, the inclusion of some simpler, easier to understand talks would have been great. Lots of the talks were very complicated and easily got to a level that was way over my head.

Thanks to everyone who helped me feel welcome at ACCU — including but not limited to Richard, Antonello, Anna-Jayne, Beth, Jackie, Fran, Russel and Odin.

In conclusion

ACCU was a fantastic experience for me. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in improving their C and C++ programming skills as well as general programming skills.
I’ll certainly be heading back next year if I can, and am happily a registered ACCU member now!