The Chicago C/C++ Users' Group (CCUG) is a voluntary professional organization of people who work with, or are otherwise interested in, the C and C++ programming languages. We have been in existence for more than 15 years, since May 2009. As of December 30, 2024, we have 2,691 members.
We have a modest website — http://ccug.chicago.il.us — which exists primarily in order to provide a link to the meetup.com website that we use for most of our communications, and which uses a URL that is a little harder to remember, http://meetup.com/Chicago-C-CPP-Users-Group. You are welcome to join our meetup.com group at the above URL, and if you do you will receive e-mail announcing all of our events.
Membership and attendance at our meetings is free, we have no membership dues or admission fees. For the first few years of our existence we would typically have between 30 and 50 people at a meeting. Starting with the year 2015 this number rose sharply, we had several meetings over the next several years with over 100 people in attendance. In-person meetings were shut down in March 2020, and after they resumed, attendance has been gradually returning to its pre-2020 levels: in 2024 we had meetings with more than 70 people in attendance (attendance statistics are based on the number of people who register for an event; we don't take attendance at our meetings).
The above means that corporate sponsors who make announcements at our meetings are likely to be addressing over 70 skilled C/C++ professionals from the greater Chicago area, many of whom are looking for jobs, or looking for better jobs, that's one of the reasons why people join professional organizations. They could also be a ready market for your product, depending on what your product is (you might be, for example, a publisher of textbooks, or of training videos).
There are three ways you can partner with a professional group such as ours.
One way is to host us, to give us a place to meet. This is particularly helpful, and we are particularly grateful, if we have more than 100 people at a meeting, because it's hard to find centrally located meeting areas that can accommodate large numbers of people.
The second way you can partner with us is to sponsor a meeting in some way. Usually this is done with pizza and beer but it can be caviar and champagne, or pens or keychains or memory sticks or bottle openers or dancing bears with your logo on them, whatever a company thinks will get it some favorable publicity, there's no end to the imaginative ways some companies have of making themselves memorable.
The third way is the most useful of all, and that is to provide us with speakers. Do you have anyone on your staff who is doing interesting work, who can give a presentation about it without revealing trade secrets? Speakers are our single greatest need, the availability of speakers is our bottleneck, the more speakers we have the more meetings we can have.
If you do any of these things, you are welcome to address our group at the beginning of the meeting, and you can be sure that the people who are there will listen to you carefully, because, as mentioned earlier, many members of professional organizations such as ours are looking for jobs, or looking for better jobs, and even the ones who are not, are always eager to hear about what positions are available. We'll also put your corporate logo, with a link to your website if you like, on our meetup.com page, in the area labeled “Our Sponsors”. I don't know if anyone ever looks at that area, but hey, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
If you want to partner with us in any of these ways, contact Jay F. Shachter at jay@ccug.chicago.il.us or telephone either 1-773-7613784 or 1-410-9964737. Or just show up at one of our meetings and speak to him in person.