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Happy start of the month! This is going to be an incredibly short Newsletter that is going to cover what we’ve been up to for all of February, and why we haven’t sent out some Newsletters during the month of love!

CoSy ⭐ Tech Con!

The date is now fully settled! And all of you reading this Newsletter will be the first to know:

• October 18-20th, 2021: Main Conference
• October 21st, 2021: Teaching & Trainings

Save the dates! Submissions will be opening in a few weeks as well. We are excited to have people submit their talks. As a reminder, we are going to be employing a double-blind system, where both submitters and reviewers will not know who is looking over their work. We are confident this will help reduce any bias in the system from names, country of origin, ethnicity, perceived gender, or otherwise! We are also going to be speaking over the coming months at various different universities, podcasts, and more to make sure we get the word out to community members not traditionally encircled with Systems Programming. (If you have a place – a college/university, a school, a video, a podcast, anything — we will be more than happy to talk to you about what we’re doing here!)

As usual, we’re still accepting any new sponsors that would like to come along. We’ve had a very positive reception and we’re glad to make sure you, your company, and/or your organization are given the recognition and perks they deserve during the conference! Feel free to reach out to us at cosy@soasis.org.

Trainings are being solidified! We’ve got a few folks who are ready, and we are reaching out to anyone else! We are interested in both established trainers and new-style trainers, just so long as you’re ready and willing to teach and offer a great one-day workshop or lecture. We will aggressively market you in any promotional material that happens, and help get as many people signed up for your courses as possible, so if you’re interested please reach out!

And now, for the thing that’s kept us busy when CoSy was not…

Better Text in C++

We are extremely excited to announce that after working very hard with JeanHeyd, we’ve created the first and most integral part of a library that works with text in C++.

ztd.text

This has been a long time coming. JeanHeyd has spoken of this idea for a year publicly and has spent much more time privately curating and preparing the source. It’s finally released and open source: https://github.com/soasis/text.

One of the reasons this took us a lot longer to get out the door is because this time around, we wanted to document everything first. Not just the API, but the Design and the Philosophy behind that design. We also got to include nice documentation images that come pretty close to being what the kids call “shitposts” these days:

We like it quite a bit!

There are plans to write some tutorial blog posts on how to use the library to define your own encodings and get plugged into the ecosystem for very little effort. JeanHeyd’s design is pretty slick, and we have nothing but praise for the Lucky 7 encoding design. He’s built it off a solid foundation of prior art and new advancements, and bridges a few corner cases and design gaps other attempts at in this space had.

So, go explore the documentation and code, and let us know how you feel about it by e-mailing opensource@soasis.org! And, of course, if it looks useful to you, absolutely do pick it up and take off to the races with it!

Wait… What about that __VA_ARGS__ stuff from last time?!

Ah, you have a good memory! But do not fret: we’re going to go over that too! We said “next time”, but we wanted to highlight the accomplishments of the last month and the things we are delivering on. We’ll get to more fun things using C and macros later. 🤓

We also might have some spicy, C Standard-related news for the next half-month newsletter, too… 👀

See you next time!

— Shepherd’s Oasis 💙