A talk with Jason Turner: the history of CppCast, and why it was shut down

I kind of do a little bit of everything at this point. I have published a book on C++ Best Practices [1] as well as 7 C++ related puzzle books. I have C++ Weekly, my YouTube channel, that I started shortly after I joined Rob on the podcast. I speak at conferences. I do code reviews for clients. I have several open-source projects. I teach classes for companies. And I do C++ contracting.

I have had many different groups of students! Companies will contract me to come into their office and teach various aspects of C++ to their developers. I mostly focus on Best Practices, but have a wide variety of material I can teach. I always give a highly customized and highly interactive class, and love traveling and seeing new parts of the world because of C++.

I really don't remember what specifically interested me in C++. It might have been seeing Dr Dobb's Journal [2] on store shelves back in the early 90's and just this general impression that somehow C++ was the "best" programming language.

Whatever that was, it stuck with me, and in university and when looking for jobs after graduation I sought out C++.

The creation of CppCast was 100% Rob Irving. Rob started the podcast and asked Jon Kalb if any of the upcoming speakers at C++Now (2015) were interesting in being guests. I had coincidentally ended up with a gap in my contracting work, and had free time available. So, I said "yes" to the invitation to be a guest on CppCast. I was the guest for the second episode ever. Then I noticed that Rob kept asking if anyone wanted to be a co-host. I volunteered to become that co-host, and the rest is history. I co-hosted with Rob from episode 5 through episode 348.

The most surprising one that always stood out was the first episode with Jonathan Muller. We were both very surprised to learn at the end of the episode that Jonathan had not even started University yet!

We of course had many memorable moments on the show. For example, Scott Meyers discussing his retirement from C++, and Andrei Alexandrescu discussing moving to full time work on the D programming language.

We both agreed at the same time that it was time to move on to other things. Hosting CppCast has been great. We had met many wonderful people, and it had opened the door for me with many amazing opportunities. But it was time. We had been working on the podcast for 7 years consistently, and it was time and OK to move on to other projects. I do recommend that anyone interested listen to our final episode where we discuss our decisions.

That has been discussed, and if anyone approached us with a reasonable proposition to take over the podcast, we would consider it.

One thing to consider is that CppCast is an important community service. If anyone were to take it over, they would have to commit to very regular episodes while discussing important community news and finding regular guests to interview.

It's exciting to have well-known members of the community on, like Bjarne. But it's more important to interview the lesser-known members of the community. Everyone has a unique story and unique experiences. Everyone's experiences are important and valuable, and we all have things we can learn from each other.

Yes, that has been fixed now.

I actually have been doing C++ Weekly for over 340 weeks now. I started it within the same year of joining Rob for CppCast. I don't really remember what my motivation was when I started it.

I know that part of it was that I still had extra time available, and I was trying to just do something interesting with my time. And now, 340 weeks (and episodes!) later, I have created a huge library of information about C++.

Many times in my career periods of unemployment or underemployment have led to new and interesting opportunities, CppCast and C++ Weekly were both borne from those times.

That article looks quite complete for the history of constexpr. I see it even references the influential talk that Ben Deane and I did ("constexpr All The Things!") back in 2017.

I currently have a YouTube playlist with 29 C++Weekly videos and my conference talks about constexpr and teach entire classes about constexpr!

And starting just this month, I've even created a "constexprt" t-shirt, as a fun play on combining "constexpr" and "expert". You can find a link to that here: https://my-store-d16a2f.creator-spring.com/.

Ironically, I don't tend to watch YouTube videos about programming. However, I can suggest that a good start is to subscribe to all of the official YouTube channels from conferences: CppCon, CppNorth, CoreC++, C++Now, C++ On Sea, etc.

That is fun, it's interesting to try and spot the same errors as the tools can find.

As far as I know, Rob is still doing the same job he was doing when we ended CppCast. For me, CppCast was part of my career. For Rob, CppCast was just a community service. It never earned a lot of money or anything like that. Rob deserves a huge amount of thanks and respect for creating the podcast at the right time, and with the right format. He created this incredible community service that impacted many careers, both through education and visibility. He helped books and products become successes by giving them a spotlight on the podcast. He had a huge impact on the C++ community, and I still feel the effects of this impact when I attend a conference and so many people come up to me and thank me for being a part of CppCast.