Guests of CppCast

Ben Deane

C++ wasn’t even among the first 10 languages that Ben learned on his programming journey, but it’s been the one that has paid the bills for the last 20-odd years. He spent most of that time in the games industry; many of the games he worked on used to be fondly remembered but now he’s accepted that they are probably mostly forgotten. These days he works in the finance industry writing high-frequency trading platforms in the most modern C++ that compilers can support.

In his spare time he watches a lot of YouTube’s educational sector, practices the Japanese art of tsundoku, reads about the history of programming, avoids doing DIY, and surprises his wife by waking in the middle of the night yelling, “of course, it’s a monad!” before going back to sleep and dreaming of algorithms.

Ben Smith

Ben is a software engineer at Google on the WebAssembly team, as well as the chair of the WebAssembly Working Group.

Billy O'Neal

Billy O’Neal is developer and standard library maintainer at Microsoft. He is also often on loan to other teams, such as the Visual C++ Infrastructure team (for example, working on the distributed compiler test harness), and most recently, the vcpkg team. Before joining the C++ team Billy worked on security compliance tooling in the former Trustworthy Computing team.

Billy Sisson

Billy is the Director of Motion Planning at Exyn, with prior experience at United Technologies (now Raytheon technologies). He studied Computer Science and Systems in undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic, with focus on robotics, controls, and electrical engineering. He’s been programming professionally using C++ for 12 years. At Exyn, Billy focuses on the autonomy of the robot- how does the robot build a searchable map of the environment? How does the robot efficiently generate safe paths from A to B? How does the robot explore the environment in a way that maximizes information gain?

Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ as well as the author of The C++ Programming Language (Fourth Edition) and A Tour of C++, Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ (Second Edition), and many popular and academic publications. Dr. Stroustrup is a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley in New York City as well as a visiting professor at Columbia University. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and an IEEE, ACM, and CHM fellow. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages.  To make C++ a stable and up-to-date base for real-world software development, he has been a leading figure with the ISO C++ standards effort for more than 25 years. He holds a master’s in Mathematics from Aarhus University and a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he is an honorary fellow of Churchill College.

Björn Fahller

Björn works for Net Insight, where he wears many hats, including mentor trainer, troubleshooter, networking protocol designer, software architect, and programmer, and he is continuously pushing the codebase to increasingly modern C++. Programming has been his full-time profession since graduating from University in 1994, mostly writing embedded software for networking equipment. Björn first experienced programming when home computers be came popular in the early 80s, and it quickly became a permanent interest of his.

Occasionally Björn has been seen tinkering with unorthodox software constructs, pondering “what can be done with this?” He lives in Stockholm.

Bob Brown

Bob Brown is the engineering manager for C++ experiences in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.