We were a fresh, tiny team. We were 3 people. 2 fresh graduates, 1 with work experience, and myself - an academic escaping to industry.

We had nothing - no infrastructure, no legacy code, no code at all. We had no working practices, no code styles, no test platforms. We had no idea about the complexities of 3D printing.

We were on a beach of sand, hoping and dreaming of reaching the famed land of product.

Upon the shore washed up The “4C” Development Environment by Arne Mertz. Never in the history of dubiously constructed project summary stories had such a portentous event occured.

With CLion, CMake, Conan and Clang as the component parts we built our small ship to sail the 4Cs. With our flag marked with the hexagonal logo of our hero “C++” we paddled away from our little beach, learning to sail our ship along the way, making mistakes, adjusting our ship here, trimming the sails there - plumbing the depths so as not to founder.

Our journey took us through storms and unsettled waters, 7Cs eventually, and a horde of other letters - we expanded our sails to Catch2 more wind. We found a Ccache of go-faster gold, and Continually Integrated our changes into our boat to keep it robust and free of leaks.

This story tells of all we learned in our adventures to product-land. The fear of pirates; our battles with a Git, his minions and his floating Lab; and many many more escapades.

Join us for a 20,000 LoC under the sea, deep-dive into all of this. Grab some flotsam and jetsam in case we sink. It’s a good Yarn.