If you build it, will they come?

This is my Lightning Talk for CPPCON 2020. I’m super grateful to Chris Ryan for posting it on LinkedIn.

Quality C++ documentation is abundant…as long as it is in English. If you’re a Spanish speaker your options are limited. This talk is about my experience in bringing es.cppreference.com, the Spanish companion site to cppreference.com, up to date to enable Spanish-speaking C++ lovers and enthusiasts a quality experience when learning C++…en español.

Many years ago I read a follow-up book to the seminal Design Patterns book by The GoF, called Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied by John Vlissides. He kept a homonymous monthly column in C++ Report, a magazine now defunct. One of the things that called my attention is that he mentioned that keeping on with design patterns was a labor of love.

Before his passing, he was kind enough to review an article that I intended to publish on Pluggable Factory and gave me very valuable feedback, as well as feedback on using the nifty counter technique–originally in the C++ ARM and then in John Lakos‘ book, Large Scale C++ (first edition)–to implement a variation of Singleton.

To me, John was an inspiring figure to give to the community without expecting anything in return, and hopefully the effort of translating C++ documentation to Spanish will enable others to learn and love this programming language that has given me so much.

So John, this is my labor of love.