In previous years, we’ve somewhat intentionally tried to balance the AI related topics for talks just as we do with every topic. Balance is important, after all. The influence on our entire industry is more pronounced and that includes our talks this year! We had yet another very competitive year with 175 talks submitted.

Announced on [ LinkedIn | X | Instagram | YouTube ]

We have an incredible lineup this leading off with 4 great keynotes! After 3 years of pestering recruiting we are thrilled to welcome Craig Kerstiens to spread the good news of PostgreSQL! The magnificent Diana Pham will be returning for the 3rd year in a row, this time as a keynote, to take us for a walk with her robot dog! Houston Hayes will be making the debut of a brand new language in Clef! Closing out the conference, the legendary Trey Grainger will transport us with Wormhole Vectors!

Beyond the keynotes, we have an additional 14 Intermediate talks covering topics from Type Driven Design, Elixir & AI, Batch Observability with Java, Training AI to ride a Pony, Computer Vision, Etherhiding Cyberthreats, programming with Julia, Mutator Testing, real world COBOL, Micro VM’s and Unikernels, Intelligent Incident Response System and the meta topic, coding C# with C#.

Rounding things out we have 11 insightful lightning talks covering a wide array of topics including an OpenLDAP Directory Overview, Protobuf Reconsideration, KEDA Event Autoscaling, Security Developer Collaboration, Vibe Coding SaaS, Keycloak Identity Integration, AI Agent Tooling Evaluation, Edge AI IoT in Ruby, YAML Open Source Moat, Career Mentorship Strategies, and AI Product Management.

Check out all the details below!

Quick Notes

Memorial Day Discount!

Since we’re a little behind schedule getting this announcement out and it is Memorial Day, we’re offering a special Memorial Day promotion! For the rest of May, you can use the discount code HONOR250 for 20% off the conference ticket price!

Get Tickets Today!

We need your help with our Lyrical Code T-shirt!

We’ve been Rickrolled! Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” was voted as the song for this year’s Lyrical Code T-shirt! Visit our Github repo to submit a verse or the entire song as code in your favorite language. You can enter as little as a single verse or a the entire song but give it a try; it doesn’t take long and it’s a lot of fun.

We’ll combine lines in different languages to make our polyglot t-shirt that you can’t help but sing when you read. Don’t give me up…don’t let me down…don’t run around…and hurt me…

Your 2026 Carolina Code Conference Speakers!

Keep scrolling for full profiles and session overviews.

// Friday Talks

WITH friday_talks AS ( -- PostgreSQL w/ CTE
    SELECT speaker, title, format, scheduled_at
    FROM talks
    WHERE DATE(scheduled_at) = '2026-08-14'
)
SELECT * FROM friday_talks ORDER BY scheduled_at;

morning.summary()

• 9:00am // Craig Kerstiens - Postgres say what? #keynote

• 10:00am // Cameron Presley - Preventing Bugs with Better Types - An Intro to Type Driven Design #intermediate

• 10:30am // Gregory Noe - A Look at OpenLDAP - The Directory Database #lightning

• 10:45am // Paul Sullivan - Elixir & AI: Coding at Ludicrous Speed #intermediate

• 11:15am // AJ Danelz - It Is Time to Reconsider Protobuf #lightning

• 11:30am // Amit Kulkarni & Yamank Vashishtha - Proactive Batch Observability: Automate File Freshness and SLA Monitoring #intermediate

• 12:00pm // Redvers Davies - My Little Claude: Codegen Isn’t Magic #intermediate

afternoon.summary()

• 1:30pm // Jack Teitel - From Pixels to Patterns: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Computer Vision #intermediate

• 2:00pm // Aaron Augustine - Event-Driven Autoscaling with Kubernetes and KEDA: Practical Strategies for Modern Applications #lightning

• 2:15pm // Amon Otis Poston - Indelible Malware: Etherhiding and the future of Cyberthreats #intermediate

• 2:45pm // Adam Anderson - From Prompt to Product: Building an SaaS company in the world of Vibe Coding #lightning

• 3:00pm // Joshua Ballanco - Julia: The Best Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of #intermediate

• 3:30pm // Neviar Rawlinson - When Security Says “High Risk” and Developers Say “But That’s How It’s Supposed to Work” #lightning

• 3:45pm // Diana Pham - Taking Your Robot Dog Off the Leash with APIs #keynote

// Saturday Talks

query { # GraphQL
  saturdayTalks: talks(
    where: { scheduled_at: { _eq: "2026-08-15" } }
    order_by: { scheduled_at: asc }
  ) {
    speaker, title, format, scheduled_at
  }
}

morning.summary()

• 9:00am // Houston Haynes - The Clef Programming Language - A Ship of Theseus Story #keynote

• 10:00am // David Mackey - What the Mutant? Using Mutator Testing to Write Better Tests #intermediate

• 10:30am // Benjamin Overcash - Integrating Keycloak #lightning

• 10:45am // Paul Jarrett - Writing Open Source Ada in 2026 #intermediate

• 11:15am // Schuster Braun - Evaluating AI Agent Tooling #lightning

• 11:30am // Marty Heyman - COBOL - Round 2 #intermediate

• 12:00pm // Gene Gotimer - Bad Things You Can Do to Unsecured Containers #intermediate

afternoon.summary()

• 1:15pm // Michael Dominick - AI at the Edge: What We Learned Building an Open-Source Industrial IoT Stack in Ruby #lightning

• 1:30pm // Tyler Benfield - Micro VMs and Unikernels: The Cloud’s Next Infrastructure Evolution #intermediate

• 2:00pm // Doug Cone - The Moat Was Made of YAML #lightning

• 2:15pm // Sonman Roul - Building Intelligent Incident Response Systems for Modern Digital Payment Platforms #intermediate

• 2:45pm // Eugene Willis - 3 Mentors #lightning

• 3:00pm // AL Rodriguez - Coding C# with C# #intermediate

• 3:30pm // Charles Bergman - In an AI world, everyone’s a Product Manager #lightning

• 3:45pm // Trey Grainger - Beyond Hybrid Search with “Wormhole Vectors” #keynote

// Full Profiles

Craig Kerstiens |> Albany, CA

Postgres @ Snowflake

Social: [ @craigkerstiens, LinkedIn, Blog, Crunchydata ]

Craig was an early part of the team at Heroku, has helped scale developer focused companies. Craig has built teams and products at Citus Data, Microsoft, Crunchy Data, and now Snowflake. Regularly writes about startups and dev tools companies.

Keynote // Postgres say what?

Category: [ Development, Other ]

Languages: [ Postgres ]

Framework/Platform: [ Postgres ]

We all love Postgres, or so we say. But can we defend it, do we know why we love Postgres?

We’ll cover a rapid fire set of what makes Postgres great. Intermixed with a lot of things you had no idea Postgres could do.

Some examples of things we’ll cover.

psql is the Postgres CLI. But don’t you want a more advanced graphical editor? Not when you realize all it can do.

What if I told you I could do a health check on your database in 5-10 minutes–asking you nothing about your app and find easy wins for performance improvement? Every Postgres database has this information to pull it off and you don’t have to be a DBA or Postgres to to take advantage.

What about watching a movie from within Postgres? Does that make any sense at all? And while watching a movie from within Postgres may not help you with your production database, engineering at times should be fun so we’ll end with a little bit of it.

Cameron Presley |> Charlotte, NC

Owner of Small Batch Solutions - Professional Problem Solver

Social: [ @pcameronpresley, LinkedIn, Blog, Smallbatchsolutions, Sessionize ]

Cameron Presley is owner of Small Batch Solutions, a speaker, and a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies.

Based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, Cameron has ten years of experience working with start-ups and large enterprise both publicly and privately held to architect solutions, implement solutions, and training developers to be better today than what they were yesterday!

In his spare time, Cameron can be found hanging out with his family, playing board games, jamming on the bass guitar, and reading books.

Intermediate // Preventing Bugs with Better Types - An Intro to Type Driven Design

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ Typescript ]

Have you ever shipped a logic error to production? What about writing code that allowed you to do something that violated business rules? Wouldn’t it have been nice if the code itself prevented you from doing the wrong thing?

By leveraging key concepts from Functional Programming, I’ll show you how you can design your business domain such that your code can’t get into a bad state (or at the very least, without jumping through some hoops).

Intended for those with C# or TypeScript, I’ll demonstrate concepts like sum types/product types for better data modeling and design patterns like Option/Result to handle when things can go wrong while we build out the game of Blackjack.

Gregory Noe |> Grand Junction, CO

LDAP Support Team Lead - Symas Corporation

Social: [ LinkedIn, Symas ]

A support engineer since 2014, I specialize in OpenLDAP deployments and directory service migrations. As support team lead at Symas on OpenLDAP solutions, I work closely with organizations to design, implement, and maintain robust directory infrastructures. My expertise includes migrating legacy systems such as ODSEE and Sun ONE to modern OpenLDAP environments, helping teams improve performance, reliability, and scalability.

In my free time, I enjoy falling off mountain bikes in north central Washington State and British Columbia.

Lightning // A Look at OpenLDAP - The Directory Database

Category: [ Security ]

Languages: [ C ]

This talk will be a relatively high level overview of Directory Databases (LDAP as defined in RFC 4000 and friends). Directory Services was an international effort in the 1980s but was designed for mainframes and X400. The Internet made a lot of that obsolete so a “Lightweight” version of the Diectory Access protocol was created: LDAP. The original work was done at the University of Michigan and that implementation languished until 1999 when the OpenLDAP project was formed.

It will talk about the unique data organization and interface and discuss topics like normal use-cases, abnormal use-cases, integrating with other software applications, security, and performance.

Paul Sullivan |> Greenville, SC

Elixir advocate. 10 years in. Still not bored.

Social: [ LinkedIn, Thoroughcare ]

Paul Sullivan is a Senior Software Engineer at ThoroughCare, a Pittsburgh-based company, living in Greer, South Carolina. A polyglot developer who has worked across many languages and stacks, he found Elixir ten years ago professionally and never looked back. When he’s not writing Elixir, he’s spending time with his family or playing guitar.

Intermediate // Elixir & AI: Coding at Ludicrous Speed

Category: [ Development, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning ]

Languages: [ Elixir ]

Framework/Platform: [ Phoenix, LIveView, BEAM, OTP ]

A recent industry study benchmarked AI coding models across 20 programming languages. Elixir came out on top — 97.5% of problems solved, the highest of any language tested. Higher than Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust. If you’ve never written a line of Elixir, that number probably surprises you.

We’ll dig into why Elixir is so uniquely productive with AI and it comes down to the language itself. Immutability means no hidden state for a model to trace. The pipe operator makes data flow explicit and readable, step by step. Pattern matching means every case is declared upfront — no nested conditionals, no hidden branches, no ambiguity. First-class documentation with verified examples gives AI models clean, correct training signal. A stable ecosystem with a decade of backwards compatibility means no conflicting patterns to confuse generation. LiveView brings real-time interactivity to the server without the complexity of a JavaScript framework, less surface area for an AI to get wrong. These aren’t accidents, they’re deliberate design choices that happen to make Elixir exceptional for AI-assisted development.

We’ll explore what makes Elixir so uniquely productive with AI through concrete examples that require no prior Elixir experience. No live coding. No Elixir evangelism. Just a surprising result from real research, and a satisfying explanation for why it happened.

AJ Danelz |> Greenville, SC

Cloud-Native | Streaming | Full-Stack Dev @ Rygen

Social: [ Blog, Rygen, Sessionize ]

I am a full-stack engineer, passionate about cloud application design and Event-driven architecture. I sometimes go outdoors for Disc golf, hiking, camping, or scuba diving. I consider myself a tinkerer, mixologist, and occasionally come up with good ideas that I write down.

Lightning // It Is Time to Reconsider Protobuf

Category: [ Development, Operations, Team Process & Management, Product ]

Languages: [ Any language Protobufs can compile to ]

Framework/Platform: [ buf.build ]

Protobuf adoption remains low despite years of maturity, but not for the reasons most developers think. The real barrier is not complexity or tooling; it is that most developers have only ever worked with JSON and never had a reason to choose something different. Protobuf does not ask you to compete with JSON on its home turf. It asks you to think about your interfaces differently.

The real case for Protobuf isn’t serialization speed. It’s contract-first development. One .proto file drives type generation across every language in your stack, schema drift becomes a lint error, and breaking changes get caught before they ship. Modern tooling (buf, ConnectRPC, protovalidate) has removed every historical friction point. This talk covers the practical path to adopting Protobuf without abandoning REST or JSON where they already work.

The tooling story has changed significantly. buf handles linting, formatting, and breaking change detection in CI. ConnectRPC works over plain HTTP without a proxy. protovalidate puts validation rules directly in the schema. Postman, VS Code, and IntelliJ all have native support.

Amit Kulkarni |> Tampa, FL

Michelin NA Site Reliability Engineer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Michelinmedia, Sessionize ]

Amit is a Site Reliability Engineer specializing in enterprise observability and distributed systems reliability at Michelin North America. He designs and implements reliability frameworks for business-critical data pipelines, with a focus on bringing SRE principles to batch processing environments.

At Michelin, Amit pioneered the organization’s latency-based SLO governance framework, protecting over $2 billion in invoice revenue through proactive monitoring and automated incident detection. His work on data freshness as a reliability signal represents a novel approach to batch system observability, enabling end-to-end visibility across multi-stage enterprise workflows. His research on enterprise observability patterns has been productionized across multiple business domains at Michelin and shared with international teams. He holds expertise in Splunk, distributed systems monitoring, SLI/SLO frameworks, and reliability engineering methodologies.

Yamank Vashishtha

Michelin NA Lead Software Engineer

Social: [ @VYamank, LinkedIn ]

Yamank Vashishtha is an experienced Mainframe Technology professional with over 18 years of expertise in COBOL, IDMS, IMS, CICS, and DB2 across complex enterprise environments. He has led modernization and migration initiatives, including transitioning legacy IDMS applications to DB2 and CICS while guiding offshore teams to deliver scalable solutions. Throughout his career at Syntel, Nityo Infotech, and CGI, he has specialized in system analysis, data processing, cross‑platform integrations, and ITIL‑aligned service delivery. In his current role as Senior Consultant at CGI Technologies & Solutions, he develops and maintains core mainframe components, supports multi‑LPAR operations, builds automation utilities, and collaborates closely with business teams to enhance system performance. Yamank is recognized for his technical depth, leadership, and commitment to operational excellence in mission‑critical environments.

Intermediate // Proactive Batch Observability: Automate File Freshness and SLA Monitoring

Category: [ Operations, DevOps ]

Languages: [ Search Processing Language ]

Modern observability focuses on APIs and microservices, yet many business-critical workflows still depend on batch jobs and file-based data pipelines. When these systems fail, they often do so silently only becoming visible after business impact.

This talk introduces a practical, tool-agnostic approach to batch observability by applying Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. The core idea is simple but powerful:

In batch systems, data freshness is the equivalent of latency in real-time systems.

If data is late or missing, the system is effectively down from a business perspective.

Attendees will learn how to model batch workflows using event-driven observability, define expected vs. actual delivery SLAs, and measure reliability using a good event vs. total event SLI approach. These signals can then be translated into meaningful SLOs aligned with business outcomes.

The session also includes a brief real-world walkthrough demonstrating how these principles can be implemented to track end-to-end workflows, detect delays proactively, and provide a single, business-aligned view of reliability.

Why Attend

If your systems rely on batch jobs, scheduled workflows, or file transfers, this talk will help you:

• Make batch systems observable and measurable

• Detect issues before business impact occurs

• Move beyond job-level monitoring to true reliability measurement

• Apply SLI/SLO thinking to non-real-time systems

Key Takeaways

• Model data freshness as a reliability signal (SLI)

• Define and enforce SLAs based on data delivery

• Connect technical signals to business impact

• Apply a tool-agnostic framework across any observability stack

Redvers Davies |> Charlotte, NC

Polyglot, Professional InfoSec Troubleseeker, and diaeresis activist.

Red is a full-time InfoSec Troubleseeker who started his professional life building ISPs, when the only interview questions were: “Do you know what a Web-Browser is?”, and “Do you think you can get NCSA httpd to compile on AIX?”.

After scaling an ISP from a few thousand users to millions, Red wrote award winning network discovery software and promptly had his IP stolen by a company with more Lawyers than developers.

Red now works in Information Security doing “AllTheThings”™, and spends his spare time playing with family, designing electronic badges for Security Conferences, exploring languages (both human and computer), and trying to squeeze every single cycle of performance out of his systems.

Intermediate // My Little Claude: Codegen Isn’t Magic

Category: [ Development, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Other ]

Languages: [ Pony ]

Framework/Platform: [ Claude Code, Ponylang ]

How do AI code generators like Claude Code perform with languages with a very small public corpus?

Mere months ago, a typical “Ask a user their name and then greet them” prompt resulted in an abominative amalgamate of python, java, and sortof-pony.

It didn’t compile. So, “Poorly”™

So how did we go from this sad state of affairs to now having Claude Code routinely contribute high quality libraries and tooling to our ecosystem?

How did we get Claude Code routinely tackling and solving compiler and runtime bugs that had been sitting in our Github Issues queues, in some cases for years?

This is the story of how we leveraged Claude from Zero to building from scratch a new Webserver, Web Application Server, Websocket Implementation, Json Parser, and Liveview-Equivalent libraries in approximately 45 days.

This is the story of how we taught Claude Pony… and how to teach Claude new tricks.

Jack Teitel

Founder & CEO at Title AI, Specializing in Computer Vision, LLM Agents, and Healthcare AI

Social: [ LinkedIn, Title-ai ]

Jack Teitel is a seasoned AI engineer and founder with over 12 years of experience turning complex data into production-ready AI solutions. As the founder/CEO of Title AI, he specializes in computer vision, LLM agents, and healthcare AI. Jack is a former adjunct professor of Data Science at University of Rochester and has been published in multiple academic journals and conferences, including AAAI and NVIDIA GTC. Passionate about both the theory and practice of AI, Jack enjoys making complex topics accessible. He thrives on solving real-world problems with AI and building systems that deliver measurable value.

Intermediate // From Pixels to Patterns: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Computer Vision

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Development ]

Languages: [ Python, MATLAB ]

Framework/Platform: [ OpenCV, ONNX, TensorRT, TensorFlow/PyTorch, Hugging Face, SAM ]

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT and LLMs these days, but there is much more to AI than that! Computer Vision (CV) is one of the most powerful and transformative fields in AI, yet it can often feel like an intimidating black box of complex math and specialized hardware. But what if you could understand and even start building computer vision applications with the skills you already have as a developer? This talk demystifies the world of pixels and patterns, offering a pragmatic guide for the curious coder.

We will journey through the core concepts of computer vision, starting from the fundamental question: how does a computer “see”? We’ll explore key tasks like image classification, object detection, segmentation, and model deployment, breaking them down into understandable components. Using practical, python-centric examples, we’ll see how pre-trained models can be leveraged to solve real-world problems without needing a PhD in mathematics.

Attendees will leave this session with a clear mental model of the computer vision landscape, an understanding of the common tools and techniques (like OpenCV, ONNX, TensorRT, SAM-3, and more), and a practical framework for identifying problems that can be solved with CV. You’ll gain the confidence to start your own computer vision project, whether it’s for a hobby, a hackathon, or the next big feature at your company. This isn’t about abstract theory; it’s about empowering you to turn images and videos into actionable intelligence.

Aaron Augustine

Senior Software Engineer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Michelinman ]

I started my career in a completely different world—working as a design engineer in the automotive industry. Along the way, I discovered a passion for software and made the leap into tech, eventually earning my master’s in computer science from Georgia Tech.

Today, I focus on building scalable backend systems and tackling complex software challenges, often using modern open-source technologies. I’m especially interested in high-performance and distributed systems, and I enjoy finding practical solutions that make systems more efficient, reliable, and easier to scale.

Lightning // Event-Driven Autoscaling with Kubernetes and KEDA: Practical Strategies for Modern Applications

Category: [ DevOps, Ecosystem, Development ]

Languages: [ Java, Go ]

Framework/Platform: [ Kubernetes ]

Kubernetes has become a cornerstone of modern application deployment, but many teams still rely on basic CPU and memory metrics when scaling their workloads.

This seminar provides a concise introduction to KEDA, Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling, and how it expands Kubernetes scaling beyond traditional resource-based signals. Designed for audiences who may not be working with the latest cloud-native stacks, the session will focus on approachable, real-world autoscaling patterns that can improve reliability, responsiveness, and resource efficiency.

We’ll look at the kinds of workloads where event-driven scaling can be useful, including backend APIs, background workers, and integration-focused microservices that depend on systems such as Kafka, queues, databases, or streaming platforms. Rather than walking through a full implementation, this session will describe the core concepts behind KEDA, the types of external signals it can use, and the practical considerations teams should keep in mind when deciding where event-driven autoscaling fits.

By the end, participants will have a clearer understanding of how KEDA can help Kubernetes applications respond dynamically to demand, and how these patterns can support more cost-effective and adaptable service architectures.

Amon Otis Poston |> Atlanta, GA

Software Engineer and North Korea Researcher

Social: [ @aogposton, LinkedIn, Blog, Ntshlabs, Instagram ]

Amon Otis Poston, a computer scientist/human rights advocate, builds anti-surveillance technology with his company NTSH and publishes NKZine, publication about North Korean tech and society.

Intermediate // Indelible Malware: Etherhiding and the future of Cyberthreats

Category: [ Cybersecurity ]

Languages: [ Solidity, Javascript ]

A recent innovation in malware hosting known as Etherhiding threatens to disrupt the conventional means of combating cyberthreats. Etherhiding is the process of hosting malware within a blockchain, thereby imbuing it with the blockchain’s characteristics; namely anonymity, indelibility, decentralization, and high availability. Traditionally, when law enforcement becomes aware of a cyber threat, they can subpoena hosting service providers to revoke service or physically locate the offending host servers and decommission them; however, Etherhiding circumvents these measures. Etherhiding was previously considered theoretical, but in 2025, North Korean state-backed cyber criminals began implementing Etherhiding, using the blockchain as a command-and-control (C2) server, in their existing Contagious Interview phishing campaign.

This talk presents an introduction to the Etherhiding technique - its uses, its ramifications on cyber security, and mitigation challenges.

Adam Anderson |> Petaluma, CA

Cybersecurity Greybeard & Thought Leader in Business-Driven Sales

Social: [ LinkedIn, Threatcaptain, Sessionize ]

Adam Anderson is a cybersecurity greybeard, serial entrepreneur, and co-founder of ThreatCaptain—a platform teaching Managed Service Providers (MSPs) how to sell cybersecurity with business clarity instead of fear.

With over two decades of experience and multiple successful exits, Adam helps MSPs shift from reacting to threats to leading conversations with business value. His frameworks empower teams to connect cybersecurity spending to real financial outcomes—turning risk reduction into a story of ROI, growth, and executive alignment.

Lightning // From Prompt to Product: Building an SaaS company in the world of Vibe Coding

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, DevOps ]

Languages: [ Loveable, ClaudeCode, ChatGPT ]

Framework/Platform: [ ChatGPT, Loveable, Gamma, Claude ]

AI did not replace developers. It replaced blank pages.

This session is a step by step playbook for building a SaaS product in the world of AI and vibe coding, without shipping a haunted codebase that only works on Tuesdays.

Adam will walk through a modern build workflow that pairs fast iteration with real engineering fundamentals: clear product constraints, ruthless scoping, AI assisted implementation, and a lightweight architecture that can survive the moment users show up.

You will learn how to:

• Define a “thin but lovable” SaaS in one page

• Use AI as a co builder, not a slot machine

• Turn vague prompts into precise tasks and tickets

• Pick a stack that ships fast and scales later

• Avoid common vibe coding failure points like spaghetti features, prompt drift, and security oops

• Instrument what matters so you know what to build next

The talk includes real examples, prompt patterns, and a repeatable build loop you can take home. You will leave with a checklist, a starter workflow, and the confidence to go from idea to working SaaS with fewer meetings and more momentum.

Joshua Ballanco |> Greenville, SC

Manhattan Metric, LLC - Principal Software Engineer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Manhattanmetric ]

Dr. Joshua Ballanco has built operating systems with Apple, local news sites with AOL, and served as the Chief Scientist for a world-wide distributed team of programming and design consultants. He even managed to complete his Ph.D. in Computational Evolutionary Dynamics along the way. He currently works remotely from his home in Greenville, SC where he lives with his beautiful wife and two kids.

Intermediate // Julia: The Best Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

Category: [ Development, Ecosystem ]

Languages: [ Scheme ]

Framework/Platform: [ Programming Languages ]

The Julia programming language has been around for over a decade, and yet it’s never quite managed to catch on with the general programming public...which is a shame! Often incorrectly perceived to be a “numeric programming language” like R or “a variation on Python”, Julia is its own, fully general programming language with a number of features and unique perspectives on how to structure programs.

In this talk I will give a general introduction to Julia, its unique type system, its focus on multiple dispatch, its magical REPL, and more. I will also touch on a number of places where Julia has found great success, and why you might want to consider Julia for your next project.

Neviar Rawlinson |> Columbia, SC

IT Governance Manager | Driving compliance, risk management, and cybersecurity maturity through practical governance frameworks

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Sessionize ]

Neviar Rawlinson is an IT Governance and Cyber Risk leader focused on helping organizations translate complex cybersecurity challenges into practical governance and risk management strategies. Her work spans change management, incident governance, enterprise risk assessment, and security program maturity across fast-paced technology environments. She has experience supporting ISO 27001 readiness, SOC 2 audit preparation, and implementing governance frameworks that strengthen security while enabling innovation. Neviar is also the founder of GRC Explained, an initiative focused on making governance, risk, and cybersecurity more accessible to technologists. She holds an MBA in IT Management, a B.S. in Computer Science, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.

Lightning // When Security Says “High Risk” and Developers Say “But That’s How It’s Supposed to Work”

Category: [ DevSecOps, Cybersecurity, Development, Career ]

Languages: [ Python, Javascript, Java, Typescript, Go ]

Framework/Platform: [ DevSecOps, Secure Software Development, Threat Modeling, Risk Assessment ]

Security teams and developers often share the same goal: building reliable, secure systems. Yet in many organizations these teams frequently find themselves in frustrating conversations about risk.

A security team flags a vulnerability as “high risk,” while the developer who built the system responds with a familiar explanation: “But that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

Both perspectives can be technically correct. Developers are focused on functionality, performance, and delivering features. Security teams evaluate the same system through a completely different lens that considers exploitability, data exposure, threat actors, and potential business impact. When those perspectives collide, communication breaks down and teams struggle to move forward.

This session explores why these conversations happen and why security and engineering teams often interpret the same system behavior in very different ways.

Through practical examples and real-world inspired scenarios, we will walk through how common development patterns can introduce security concerns even when the system behaves exactly as designed. We will examine how security teams assess risk, why certain issues escalate quickly, and how misunderstandings about threat models and system behavior create friction between teams.

Rather than focusing on tools or frameworks, this talk focuses on the human and organizational side of DevSecOps. Attendees will gain insight into how security teams evaluate risk, why some vulnerabilities become major incidents while others do not, and how developers and security professionals can collaborate earlier in the development lifecycle.

By understanding how both sides approach security challenges, teams can move beyond friction and build stronger partnerships that lead to more resilient software systems.

Diana Pham |> Denver, CO

Developer Advocate at Vonage and Appwrite Hero

Social: [ @dianasoyster, LinkedIn, Blog, Developer, Instagram, Sessionize ]

With a high spirit and a low sense of mortality, Diana completed her master’s in CS regardless of never having coded prior to grad school. Through her passion for learning and teaching tech, she found her calling in advocacy, where she exercises her creativity through conference talks and content creation. Her hobbies include snowboarding, competing in beauty pageants, making lifestyle content on IG (@cachefeelings_), gardening, and eating oysters.

Keynote // Taking Your Robot Dog Off the Leash with APIs

Category: [ Other ]

This is a story about a robot dog named Peanut, and what happens when an autonomous system leaves the comfort of the lab for the unpredictability of the real world.

Hardware is only as smart as the network it lives on. When you take a robot out of a controlled lab and into the wild, you immediately run the risk of poor connection and security gaps. This session uses a live robot dog as a visual aid to demonstrate how to use tools like SIM-based authentication and location-aware triggers to keep the connection secure and reliable. Aside from keeping things connected, we’ll look at how developers can programmatically request high-priority data lanes and improve performance the moment a mission-critical task kicks in.

Houston Haynes |> Asheville, NC

Founder of SpeakEZ.ai - former F# Software Foundation Board of Trustees

Social: [ @SpeakezTech, LinkedIn, Blog, Speakez, Sessionize ]

Houston’s career started out of university when he was hired by his research advisor Bob Moog who was restarting his business at the time of Houston’s graduation. That eventually led to the revival of Moog Music as an international brand. He has since worked in industries ranging from entertainment to automotive, where robotic process automation, software-based decision support and related intelligent devices were always part of the picture. He founded SpeakEZ in 2021 in response to the corporate surveillance proliferating in cloud services and continues his work designing security and privacy-minded intelligent services for organizations of all sizes.

Keynote // The Clef Programming Language - A Ship of Theseus Story

Category: [ Ecosystem, Development, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning ]

Languages: [ C#, F#, Rust, Haskell, Erlang, C++, Clef ]

Framework/Platform: [ Multiple hardware targets ]

This talk follows up my presentation from last year where I showed the Fidelity Framework. It brought together F# and FStar among other elements, toward hardware-software co-design using MLIR and other technologies. This made a clear break from the .NET ecosystem while having a “long shared edge” with .NET and Fable ecosystems. Over the past year, the Clef language emerged from that thesis, and while the shared edges with .NET and Fable are at greater length, the end result is a more flexible and more capable systems programming environment. This presentation is an overview of that journey from “F# native” to a new ML-family language with its own syntax and semantics.

David Mackey |> Augusta, GA

Software Engineer / Owner, Eccentric Quality Solutions LLC

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Eccentricquality ]

Meetup: [ https://techtalkaugusta.com/ ]

Dave is interested in search (information retrieval), discovery, and knowledge management. He has worked in IT for 25+ years both on the coding and system sides. He currently works primarily in Python and TypeScript with prior experience in (vanilla) JavaScript, PHP, and C#/VB.NET. He loves HTML and tolerates CSS.

Intermediate // What the Mutant? Using Mutator Testing to Write Better Tests

Category: [ Development, DevOps, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Testing / QA ]

Languages: [ Typescript, Javascript, Python, All ]

Framework/Platform: [ Hypothesis and Stryker ]

Does your project have tests? This may elicit laughter. Some nervous shuffling. Some hedging, “Sure, we have tests, but I’m not saying how many.”

Even when projects have tests the quality of those tests varies widely. Tests, at their worse, can give a sense of false confidence. “I know nothing broke because all my tests still run.” But what if the tests aren’t testing what they need to?

AI’s ability to write tests can greatly intensify this problem. It looks good, so it must work right?

How can we know that our tests are actually working correctly? One way is by using mutant or property testing on our tests.

Mutant testing involves an application making thousands of small changes to our application that should cause our tests to fail. It then checks if the tests actually do fail and provides a report we can use to correct and beef up our incorrect tests.

I’ve found using mutant testing increasingly important the more I do agentic coding. How do we verify that the tests the AI is writing are correct? While not the solution, performing mutant testing on our codebase can help.

I’ll provide a brief introduction to two popular mutant testing frameworks - Hypothesis (Python), and Stryker (JS/TS), including brief walkthroughs on how to setup and utilize these frameworks.

Benjamin Overcash

System Architect

Social: [ LinkedIn, Sessionize ]

I am a System Architect and Full Stack Developer. I’ve been with CoLinx, LLC since 2008. My professional focus has been on e-commerce and web application development and I’ve always had a passion for security and authentication.

In my free time I am a maker. I love tinkering with old computers and electronics and my most recent obsession is the Z80 CPU.

Lightning // Integrating Keycloak

Category: [ Cybersecurity ]

Languages: [ Java ]

Framework/Platform: [ Keycloak ]

The CoLinx Journey: Modernizing Identity in a Complex Ecosystem Since 2020, CoLinx, LLC—a joint venture providing IT solutions for competing manufacturing groups—has been on a journey to modernize authentication. This talk outlines how we integrated Keycloak into a long-established e-commerce platform with tens of thousands of users and complex legacy permissions, moving from static security to a robust, OIDC-compliant “Trust Service.”

Key Topics & Architectural Strategies:

Why Keycloak? A look at why we chose Keycloak over SaaS giants like Auth0 and Okta, focusing on extensibility through Java SPIs to meet complex business logic and on-premise requirements.

The “Pass-Through” Migration: How to avoid high-risk “lift-and-shift” migrations using Federated User Providers. We draw a box around login/password steps while leaving existing user storage intact, allowing for a phased transition.

Decoupling AuthN from AuthZ: A deep dive into our core philosophy: treating Keycloak strictly as an Identity Authentication Platform while reframing legacy systems as Authorization Platforms. This split simplifies OIDC adoption by clearly limiting scopes.

Identity Brokering & Multi-Tenancy: Leveraging Realms to silo users by tenancy and using Keycloak as an Identity Broker to bridge external SSOs, corporate ADs, and owner platforms safely.

Zero-Secret Transmission: How we replaced static API keys with Service Accounts using the JWT Authorization Grant flow (RFC 7523). We’ll discuss the security benefits of asymmetric trust, where credentials are never transmitted, only proven via signed, short-lived tokens.

Hard-Won Lessons from the Field: We wrap up with a “Practitioner’s Checklist” of effective security and deployment practices:

Container Security: Managing custom base images to maximize deployment velocity and CVE response.

Deep Extensions: Moving beyond themes by extending Form Providers and REST APIs to integrate with existing localization and CMS platforms.

The Ecosystem Pivot: A critical warning on the abandoned Keycloak Java Servlet Filter and the move toward modern alternatives like Spring Security and Nimbus.

Who this talk is for: Developers and architects looking to modernize identity in “brownfield” environments where data sovereignty, complex tenancy, and high-stakes security are non-negotiable.

Paul Jarrett |> Charleston, SC

Software Engineer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog ]

Paul is a software engineer who started ada-lang.io, and holds a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and an MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. He used to split atoms while under the ocean in a boat with no windows.

Intermediate // Writing Open Source Ada in 2026

Category: [ Ecosystem, Development ]

Languages: [ Ada ]

Learn Ada’s unique perspective on expressing problem domain and systems programming concepts, and how you can borrow powerful ideas to improve your next program.

We’ll explore how Ada’s open source ecosystem has modernized over the past five years to deliver a modern development experience.

This talk covers how Ada handles types, encapsulation, and pointer types differently, along with its representation of scope-based resources, sum types, and tasks. You’ll see how Ada makes calling C functions safer, supports automatic ordered initialization, and enables creating and sharing formally verified and other libraries through the Alire package manager.

Schuster Braun |> Augusta, GA

Microsoft Senior Engineer, Softground Owner

Social: [ LinkedIn, Techtalkaugusta ]

Meetup: [ techtalkaugusta.com ]

I’m a Senior engineer at Microsoft during the day. At night I run a small business called SoftGround. My goal is to give tech folks opportunities to work on projects that impact the local community. I also run a monthly meetup Tech Talk Augusta, with the goal of providing speaker experience for folks

Lightning // Evaluating AI Agent Tooling

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Development ]

Languages: [ Python, Typescript, infrasturcture ]

The evaluation harnesses are currently being created to test Agentic tooling. There’s quite a bit of traction around evaluating custom built agents and agentic workflows. However, we’re now seeing tooling orchestrations built on top of Agents. Think “I want to write a bunch of prompts and instruction files and put them into my repo. How then do you judge if you’re making things better or not.” Also, are your instructions good for Github Copilot and bad for Claude? If you’re an AI architect you need to have answers to these questions. There’s a new tool out called Harbor built by laude institute, which is showing promise. It’s built on top of terminal-bench. I’m currently working on a project to automate running VSCode, starting off with SWE-Bench Verified metrics. I’d like to go over SWEBench, what it does and how it’s helpful, writing your own evaluations, and what it’s like doing this research

Marty Heyman |> Grand Junction, CO

CoFounder

Social: [ LinkedIn, Symas ]

Marty has been in the computer field since 1967. After too long at IBM and several ventures afterward he co-founded Symas Corporation in 1999. He has experience ranging from 1401 punched card/tape systems to evaluating IBM’s floating point formats versus competitors to working on ports of UNIX to mainframes. His current primary focus is on Open Source COBOL compilers (GnuCOBOL and GCC COBOL) but he’s still an architect and support manager for OpenLDAP Tech Support.

Intermediate // COBOL - Round 2

Category: [ Development, Career ]

Languages: [ COBOL ]

Last year, Jim Lowden talked about the “Once and Future COBOL”. This is a follow up session just because last year’s session was so well received.

COBOL is an ongoing challenge for the world’s largest organizations. There are between 200 and 800 BILLION lines of COBOL source code for the production programs mostly written between the mid 1960s through the mid 1980s. The estimates are subject to much controversy but the 200B is pretty well accepted. In going over sample code we’ve worked on for Proof of Concept projects we found over 30 million lines in minor application samples provided by four end-user corporations. COBOL is verbose and the corpus is enormous.

I thought it would be fun to look at some example code, maybe take questions, time permitting, and talk a bit more about the difference between the modern (2023) COBOL Language Standard and the IBM 1968 compiler’s language.

Finally, I’m going to share some insights into the “COBOL Skills Shortage” and what that means for career opportunities as the job market continues to shift under our feet.

Gene Gotimer |> Leesburg, VA

DevSecOps Engineer

Social: [ @OtherDevOpsGene, LinkedIn, Praeses, Sessionize ]

Gene Gotimer is a DevSecOps Engineer who loves playing with new tools, focusing on agile processes, securing development practices, and automating everything. Gene feels strongly that repeatability, quality, and security are all strongly intertwined; each depends on the other two, making agile and DevSecOps crucial to software development.

Intermediate // Bad Things You Can Do to Unsecured Containers

Category: [ DevSecOps, Cybersecurity, Security, DevOps ]

Framework/Platform: [ Docker, Kubernetes ]

There is plenty of advice about what to do when building and deploying containers to make sure we are secure. But why do we need to do them? How important are some of these “best” practices? Can someone take over my entire system because I missed one step? What is the worst that could happen, really?

Join Gene as he demonstrates some of the bad things that can happen when we take shortcuts with securing our containers. We’ll look at some common security recommendations, but we’ll focus more on the impact of not securing containers properly. Nothing reinforces good practices more than seeing what not to do and why.

If you’ve ever wondered how important those container recommendations are, this is where you can find out.

Michael Dominick |> Lithia, FL

Mike Dominick, Coder Radio Host & The Mad Botter Founder

Social: [ @dominucco, LinkedIn, Blog, Alice, Sessionize ]

Podcast: [ Coder Radio ]

Michael Dominick is a software engineer, open-source maintainer, and founder of The Mad Botter Inc. He works at the intersection of legacy systems, industrial data, and modern analytics, helping organizations modernize without breaking what already works.

He is the creator of Dredger-IoT, an open-source Ruby-based industrial telemetry agent designed to run at the edge, where unreliable networks, constrained hardware, and decades-old systems are the norm rather than the exception. His work focuses on pragmatic engineering: building systems that survive real environments before layering on automation and AI.

Michael is also the host of Coder Radio, a long-running technology podcast where he speaks with developers and industry practitioners about software craftsmanship, tooling, and the human side of engineering.

With experience spanning Ruby, Python, ETL pipelines, and industrial IoT, Michael brings a grounded, experience-driven perspective to topics often dominated by theory & hype.

Lightning // AI at the Edge: What We Learned Building an Open-Source Industrial IoT Stack in Ruby

Category: [ Development, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Team Process & Management ]

Languages: [ Ruby, C++, Python ]

Framework/Platform: [ Ruby on Rails, DuckDB, IOT ]

Industrial IoT is usually discussed at the cloud or dashboard layer, but the hardest problems often live much closer to the machines.

This talk shares lessons learned building Dredger-IoT, an open-source Ruby-based telemetry agent designed to run at the edge, collect industrial data, and feed modern analytics and AI systems without rewriting existing infrastructure.

Rather than focusing on hype or vendor tooling, we will explore the practical realities of edge systems:

• Interfacing with legacy equipment and protocols

• Operating in unreliable, resource-constrained environments

• Designing data pipelines that are resilient before they are “intelligent”

From there, we look at where AI actually fits — not as a replacement for good engineering, but as a force multiplier once reliable telemetry exists.

Topics include:

• Why most AI initiatives fail before data ever reaches the model

• Designing edge software that survives the real world

• Using lightweight agents to bridge legacy systems to modern platforms

• Open-source tradeoffs when building industrial software

This session is grounded in real code, real deployments, and real mistakes. It is aimed at developers and team leads who want to understand how edge data, open source, and AI intersect outside of idealized architectures.

Attendees will leave with a clearer mental model of edge-first systems and concrete ideas they can apply in their own environments.

Tyler Benfield |> Charlotte, NC

Staff Software Engineer at Prisma

Social: [ @rtbenfield, LinkedIn, Blog, Sessionize ]

Tyler is a software engineer with a focus on making databases and data-driven applications more approachable through education and tooling. With over 10 years of experience developing software in consulting, startups, and large organizations, he’s gathered a wealth of knowledge that he enjoys sharing with others. In his free time, he enjoys playing beach volleyball, hiking, and repairing arcade cabinets.

Intermediate // Micro VMs and Unikernels: The Cloud’s Next Infrastructure Evolution

Category: [ Ecosystem ]

Languages: [ language agnostic ]

Framework/Platform: [ microVMs and unikernels on Firecracker ]

The cloud is always evolving. While some technologies dominate today, new innovations are shaping the next generation of cloud infrastructure. One breakthrough we’ll explore is unikernel-backed micro VMs, enabling stateful serverless workloads without cold starts.

In this session, we’ll take a step back to examine how cloud infrastructure has transformed application development and where it’s headed next. With unikernels driving secure, serverless environments that scale to zero, even traditionally complex workloads like databases and networking are going serverless. Join us to prepare for this next wave of computing and unlock its potential when it arrives.

This session is designed for an audience familiar with deploying to traditional cloud environments. While focused on infrastructure, there is valuable knowledge for application developers who desire to be on the forefront of new technology. You’ll see examples of this new model deployed in the real-world and learn about the shortcomings it addresses with current norms.

Doug Cone |> Greenville, SC

Inteligence Applied

Social: [ @nullvariable, LinkedIn, Blog, Nullvariable, Sessionize ]

As a kid, my parents limited my computer time (I needed limits!), but I loved writing code so much that I filled many notebooks with handwritten code so I could input it later to see if it worked the way I expected. My first internet coding gig with The Navigators was while I was still in high school.

As a freelancer I found I was building the same solutions over and over again, and started down a path of building my own CMS (as many no doubt have). Along the way I discovered Drupal and WordPress, and I never looked back. After a number of years working freelance, I found that it was tough to focus on the deep type of coding work that I enjoy doing, while needing to constantly sell the next project. From there I’ve lived the agency and startup life, and loved it. Today I’m privileged to work for a company that delivers a leading webops experience for Drupal and WordPress powered websites across some 10B pages a month.

Lightning // The Moat Was Made of YAML

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Ecosystem, Career, Product ]

Framework/Platform: [ Open Source ]

I run Mattermost instead of Slack. Grafana instead of paid dashboards. Planka instead of Trello. A year ago, that made me the guy who hates money and loves debugging config files. Today, AI agents handle the config files, and I just have better tools that I actually own.

SaaS stocks are down 20% in the first quarter. Seat counts are dropping. The “SaaS is dead” crowd is having a moment. They’re half right. But they’re half wrong in a way that matters.

The real shift isn’t that AI can vibe-code a replacement for your SaaS tools. That just gives you a pile of technical debt with a chatbot on top. The real shift is that solid open source projects already exist for most of what you’re paying subscriptions for, and AI just eliminated the main reason teams didn’t adopt them: the friction. Nobody wanted to spend three days reading docs, matching configs to their infrastructure, debugging install scripts. That grunt work was the entire reason you paid Slack instead of standing up Mattermost. A capable AI agent can now read the docs, match the config to your systems, and get a proven project running in minutes. You’re not vibe-coding something fragile. You’re grabbing real projects with real communities and letting AI handle the grindy parts.

Now, I’m not going to stand up here and pretend this applies to everything. Some bosses still want a throat to choke when things break, and they’re not wrong. Switching costs are organizational trauma, not a technical problem. Your ERP isn’t going anywhere. But your drawer full of $15/seat/month tools that AI can replace with a prompt and an API call? That’s dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.

In this talk, I’ll cover:

• Why SaaS is splitting in two: systems of record (your oven) vs. AI wrappers (that avocado slicer you forgot you bought)

• The real threat to SaaS isn’t vibe coding, it’s AI-assisted adoption of mature open source

• What actually happens when you hand an AI agent the install docs for Mattermost, wger, or Planka (live examples from my own stack)

• The friction that’s left, and why it’s organizational, not technical

• Every AI tool you use right now costs the company behind it $2-5 for every $1 you pay. That’s a subsidy, not a business model. Subsidies end.

Sonman Roul |> Phoenix, AZ

Senior Product Manager, American Express

Social: [ Sessionize ]

Sonman Roul is a technology leader specializing in digital payments, enterprise platforms, and financial technology innovation. With over fourteen years of experience building and scaling global payment solutions, he has led the development of multiple B2B payment platforms that connect enterprise systems with partner payment networks. His work focuses on modernizing payment infrastructure through real time payment capabilities, API driven ecosystems, and intelligent automation. He has also established governance and operational frameworks supporting secure and compliant financial transactions across complex partner environments. Sonman’s research interests include digital payment architecture, incident management in financial systems, and the use of artificial intelligence to improve reliability and efficiency in large scale payment platforms.

Intermediate // Building Intelligent Incident Response Systems for Modern Digital Payment Platforms

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, DevOps ]

Languages: [ Python, Java ]

Modern digital payment platforms operate within highly interconnected technology ecosystems that support billions of transactions and complex integrations between financial institutions, enterprise platforms, and third party technology providers. While this connectivity enables innovation and global scalability, it also introduces new operational risks that traditional incident management frameworks often struggle to address. Payment system disruptions can rapidly propagate across integrated infrastructures, creating cascading operational failures and financial exposure.

This research investigates how advanced monitoring technologies, artificial intelligence driven anomaly detection, and automated response architectures can transform incident management practices within large scale digital payment environments. Through an extensive analysis of enterprise payment infrastructures and distributed financial platforms, the study examines how modern engineering practices can reduce operational risk and improve system reliability.

The research combines empirical operational data with longitudinal analysis of incident response strategies implemented across diverse technology environments. Findings reveal that legacy monitoring systems frequently fail to detect emerging anomalies early enough to prevent service disruption. By contrast, machine learning enabled monitoring platforms demonstrate the ability to identify abnormal transaction patterns and infrastructure behaviors hours before major incidents occur.

Automated remediation frameworks further enhance system resilience by triggering predefined response actions such as service isolation, load redistribution, and automated recovery workflows. These intelligent response mechanisms reduce mean time to detection and resolution while minimizing the need for manual intervention during critical incidents.

The study also highlights the importance of collaborative incident governance models that integrate engineering teams, security specialists, and compliance stakeholders. Such models enable faster decision making, more transparent communication, and improved regulatory accountability across financial technology ecosystems.

By integrating intelligent monitoring, predictive analytics, and automated remediation capabilities, organizations can evolve from reactive incident management toward adaptive and self optimizing operational systems. The findings offer practical guidance for software developers, cybersecurity specialists, and DevOps practitioners seeking to design resilient digital infrastructures capable of supporting the next generation of global payment platforms.

Eugene Willis

Eugene Willis Jr. | Higher Ed Helpdesk Tech | Application Analyst | Red Hat Enthusiast | Emcee | Creative Strategist | single sign-on

Social: [ LinkedIn ]

Eugene Willis Jr. is an Application Analyst, Red Hat Systems Administrator, and Helpdesk professional who built his career in tech from the ground up. Starting without a formal background, he worked his way from support roles into managing Red Hat systems and higher education applications. With degrees in Business and Marketing, Eugene blends technical expertise with creative strategy to solve real-world problems. Outside of tech, he’s a touring emcee and author who enjoys mentoring others and helping them carve out their own path forward.

Lightning // 3 Mentors

Category: [ Career ]

At every stage of our careers, growth doesn’t happen in isolationit happens because someone helps us see and strengthen what we lack. In this lightning talk, I’ll share the concept of the 3 mentors. This isn’t about finding one perfect guide who has all the answers. It’s about building a small, intentional circle of people who each sharpen you in a different way. As I’ve grown from helpdesk into systems and application work, I’ve realized that no single person could have filled every gap I had. But the right combination of voices made all the difference.

The first mentor is the technical mentor. This is the person who helps you level up your hard skills. They’re the one you go to when something breaks, when you’re trying to understand a new system, or when you need to think through a better way to build or automate something. They don’t just give you answers—they challenge how you think. They might review your scripts, question your configurations, or show you more efficient ways to approach problems. For me, this kind of mentor helped turn confusion into clarity and gave me the confidence to step into more advanced technical spaces.

The second mentor is the career mentor. This person sees the bigger picture. They’re not just focused on what you’re doing today, but where you’re going next. They help you understand how to navigate your field, when to take opportunities, and how to position yourself for growth. They might help you prepare for interviews, advocate for yourself in meetings, or recognize when it’s time to move on to the next challenge. This mentor helps you connect the dots between your current role and your long-term goals, especially when those dots aren’t obvious.

The third mentor is the life mentor. This is the one people often overlook, but they’re just as important. They help you stay grounded. They remind you that your career is part of your life not the whole thing. They might not work in tech at all, but they understand you as a person. They help you manage stress, keep perspective, and make decisions that align with your values. When things get overwhelming or unclear, this mentor helps you reset and refocus.

What makes this concept powerful is that these mentors don’t have to be formal, and they don’t all have to know each other. They can be people you meet at work, in your community, or even through conversations that happen once in a while but leave a lasting impact. The key is being intentional recognizing where you need growth and being open to learning from others in those areas.

As I share this idea, my goal isn’t to tell you exactly who your three mentors should be. It’s to encourage you to think about who’s currently influencing your growth and where you might have gaps. Because the reality is, we all have blind spots. And the right people, at the right time, can help turn those blind spots into strengths.

AL Rodriguez

Developer, Developer, Developer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Duendesoftware ]

Meetup: [ Orlando .NET User Group ]

AL Rodriguez is a developer, cloud enthusiast, 3 kids in a trench coat, sometimes-blogger, and international speaker. With a background in software development, and a clear lack of self restraint, he specializes in using .NET for everything. An ASP.NET Core backend and a Blazor frontend? Check. IoT devices, Playwright UI Testing, CI/CD DevOps, or even Infrastructure as Code? Oh yeah, all C#! When he’s not working, he’s playing games, making stupid jokes, or arguing with code in a personal repo. You can read his latest rantings or catch up on videos at his site: ProgrammerAL.com

Intermediate // Coding C# with C#

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ C# ]

Framework/Platform: [ .NET ]

Remembering every step of a coding pattern opens the door to mistakes. We’re human after all (or an LLM trained on human written code). Thankfully we can write C# code that helps us write our C# code. C# Roslyn Analyzers, Roslyn Code Fixes, and even Source Generators can help us automate the code we write.

In this session we’ll review the basics of those aforementioned features built into C# for codifying our code. We’ll also take time to discuss the pros and cons of those features to understand when it’s beneficial to codify our code or not.

Charles Bergman

Product Guy

Social: [ LinkedIn, Sessionize ]

Charles is an experienced Product leader, building products like CreditWise (Capital One), Healthcare.gov and Rate.com.

He specializes in building products people can actually enjoy using, reducing organizational dysfunction, and mentoring others on how to do the same.

Charles builds and delivers with cross-functional teams, translates complex data into clear decisions, and operates at the intersection of customer needs, financial value, and technological possibility.

Lightning // In an AI world, everyone’s a Product Manager

Category: [ Product, Team Process & Management, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning ]

Experienced Product Manager gives a humorous talk about:

1. Explains the role of a Product Manager at an almost absurdly basic level

2. The “role” of a Product Manager is done by everyone, whether they realize it or not. Some people like/dislike this type of work more than others. I’ll explain the difference with examples of what is “PM” work vs “not-PM” work

3. We transition into AI as we all realize how much of the “not-PM” work can be fairly easily done by AI. Which leaves a whole lot of “PM” work on the table which can’t easily be done by AI. Hence the name of the Session Title.

4. We’ll end on a high note - with points contradicting the sentiment that “technical work is dead”. Some funny examples of if business people try to work directly with AI tools to build, and some tips and tricks for a potential peaceful transition to a post-AI world.

Trey Grainger |> Greenville, SC

Author: AI-Powered Search, Founder @ Searchkernel

Social: [ @treygrainger, LinkedIn, Blog, Searchkernel, Sessionize ]

TREY GRAINGER is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. He is also the co-author of Solr in Action (Manning, 2014), the leading book on Apache Solr. Trey has over 18 years of experience in search and data science, including significant work developing semantic search, personalization, and recommendation systems, and building self-learning search platforms leveraging content and behavior-based reflected intelligence. This work resulted in the publication of dozens of research papers, journal articles, conference presentations, and books at the cutting edge of intelligent search systems.

Keynote // Beyond Hybrid Search with “Wormhole Vectors”

Category: [ Development, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Other ]

Languages: [ Python ]

Framework/Platform: [ Apache Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, Elasticsearch, Weaviate ]

Wormhole Vectors are emerging as a technique to unify query understanding and retrieval across disparate vector spaces and query modalities (lexical, semantic, behavioral, etc.). This provides a significant improvement over typical hybrid search algorithms common in vector databases, search engines, RAG (retrieval augmented generation), and agentic search.

Most hybrid search implementations combine BM25 scoring on lexical keyword matches (best for matching specific words or labels) with semantic search on dense vector embeddings (better for matching the meaning of queries) and then fuse the results into a combined results list. Most agentic search approaches, likewise, treat lexical/BM25 and semantic/embedding search as independent tools that return separate sets of search results.

Wormhole vectors, in contrast, enable a unique form of pseudo-relevance feedback, utilizing the underlying documents in your search engine to find shared meaning(s) and query intention across these different vector spaces (sparse lexical space vs. dense semantic space). We can even build and leverage “behavioral” vector spaces based upon collaborative filtering, for introducing learned meaning from user interactions.

In this talk, we’ll show how hybrid search is typically implemented, how wormhole vectors work, and how to use them to traverse between disparate vector spaces as an improvement over hybrid search. You’ll see how to jump back and forth between multiple dense and sparse vector spaces in the same query, and we’ll show benchmarks and examples of how wormhole vectors compare to other leading query models and approaches like SPLADE and hybrid fusion algorithms. We’ll show with open source code and search engines how to implement these wormhole vectors, demonstrating their impact on search quality for traditional search, RAG, and agentic search.

Go get your tickets during our Memorial Day promo and we hope to see you this August!

Get Tickets Today!

Greenville is not unique in this either. Numerous tech communities exist in the southeast, particularly in our orbit around South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. At the Carolina Code Conference, we go out of our way to connect with other tech communities including making a special invitation video for you to share at your meetup groups to invite you directly. Our goal is to bring all of our communities together every year.

None of these communities happened by accident. It all came from the efforts of numerous people who care enough about our community to work together to help us all thrive. Those people who freely give of themselves to make our communities possible often do not receive the recognition that they deserve.

It’s time to change that.

This year we created an Annual Award for Service to the Southeast Tech Community and named it in honor of Jim Ciallella, one of our hardest working and most selfless contributors for approximately 20 years. Adam Gautsch shared on LinkedIn how proud he was to see Jim recognized; excerpt below.

We also back filled the award, giving out one for each of the 5 years the Carolina Code Conference has existed: 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

You can scroll up to watch the video of the initial announcement during the 2025 conference, recognition of Jim and all of our initial award winners as well. Smiles and head nodding was almost universal as we talked through the intention of the award with our crowd from Asheville, Augusta, Knoxville, Athens, Atlanta, Columbia, Charleston, Charlotte and more.

Because this year’s award was a surprise we did not solicit public nominations so all of the winners were from the Greenville area. Going forward we want you to nominate the people in your communities who deserve to be recognized for their service.

Nominate Your Community Leaders

The nomination form was initially shared in our 2025 Recap post. You can nominate as many people as you like and there are a lot of fields. We want to enable you to make the best case possible for your candidate. These recommendations will be considered every year, so you can make a strong case for 2026 and that individual may end up the winner in 2028! You can begin Submitting Nominations for the Jim Ciallella Award for Outstanding Service to the Southeast Tech Community right now!

The Jim Ciallella Award Winners

Congratulations to our first recipients of the The Jim Ciallella Award and thank you all for your service to our communities!

• 2018 - Joel Taddei

• 2019 - Christina Roberts

• 2023 - Ben Acord

• 2024 - Pamela Wood Browne

• 2025 - Robert Roskam

Video Notes

• 00:00 - Let’s talk about Community

• 02:18 - Jim Ciallella Recognized

• 08:12 - 2018 Winner - Joel Taddei Recognized

• 09:59 - 2019 Winner - Christina Roberts Recognized

• 11:44 - 2023 Winner - Ben Acord Recognized

• 13:26 - 2024 Winner - Pamela Wood Browne Recognized

• 16:21 - 2025 Winner - Robert Roskam Recognized

• 18:08 - We want to hear from your communities!

Additionally, if you are involved with a meetup and would like to share our invitation video with them, reach out to meet to get a discount code that will continue working for your group beyond March 31st.

Our 2026 Call for Sponsors remains open and we are looking forward to getting everything rolling with you as we get our new CRM system rolling.

And finally, March 31st is also the close of this year’s Call for Speakers! If you have a talk you would like to submit for consideration, don’t miss it!

Event Details & Registration

A funny thing happened though. Although we traveled to attend numerous groups in person, the best response last year came from making a short video at my desk that was shared with a couple of other groups. With that in mind, our video team from Aaron Pate Media helped us to put together a more formal invitation.

If you are involved with or regularly attend a meetup group in the Quad State area (NC, SC, TN, GA), please take a couple of minutes to show this video to your attendees. But before you do, contact me at barry@carolina.codes to get a discount code for 20% off to share with your meetup.

Tickets are already discounted by 20% until April 1st and the discount code will still apply! Full details and itinerary can be found at our Event Details and Registration page.

We hope to see you and your meetup there!

Get Your Tickets Today

The event brings together about 300 attendees over 3 nights and 2 days with opportunities for attendees to intimately get to know your brand, during the conference, at your booth and during social gatherings in the evenings after the conference day has concluded.

During the conference, Platinum, Gold and Silver tier sponsors will be able to setup booth space in our Sponsor Hall. This area is the central gathering place at the venue for conversations, networking and where food is served.

Whether you are looking to help attendees be more informed about your services or you are looking for talent, this space facilitates all of it.

We look forward to finding new and creative ways to showcase your company during this fantastic annual event. Please reach out via email to sponsor@carolina.codes with any questions or to schedule a meeting.

For 2026, our sponsorship tiers are laid out with almost the same structure as 2025 so there won’t be any surprises there. As with every other aspect of the conference, we are constantly experimenting and trying new things to see what works and what doesn’t.

In 2025 Andrew MacLean of Twilio, visiting the conference from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada in 2025 who had this to say…

“I’ve been to developer conferences around the world, and the Carolina Code Conference, is truly something special. This conference is, without a doubt, one that was built by developers for developers, and you can feel that in every part of the event. I mean, where else can you go from a talk on COBOL, straight to a cybersecurity CTF, and then over to a booth showcasing the latest and greatest tech, and somehow it all just works?

I’m so glad I found CCC, and I’m even happier I didn’t just attend, but also got the chance to speak and connect with so many passionate practitioners. People might call this a “little” conference, but don’t sleep on Greenville. The community is incredible, the talks are top-tier, and the impact is way bigger than you’d expect. Once you’ve been, you’ll want to come back every year.”

We hope to have you become a part of it!

Become a Sponsor

Changes from 2025

Here are the changes from 2025 that you’ll want to know about.

1. Returning sponsors will still get 20% off of any tier!

2. Ticket allocations included for all sponsorship tiers have increased so you can invite more people.

3. Tickets now have an option for attendees to opt-in to share their contact information with Platinum and Gold tier sponsors. We always receive requests for this information but are unable to provide it without authorization, so this gap has been addressed (finally).

4. In 2025 we experimented with the option to allow sponsors to offer paid training classes in the area the day before the conference. We did receive some interested, but not enough for year. If you are interested, please let us know.

5. Sponsor logos are included in all email footers now.

2026 Overview

We have 4 primary sponsorship tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum and a single premium Title sponsorship that can be discussed as well (ie - The Carolina Code Conference by Premium Title Sponsor). The expected audience size will remain 300 attendees each day thanks to the capacity at our beautiful and functional venue by Flywheel! Since the expected capacity remains the same as 2024 and 2025, all sponsorship tiers will be priced the same as well.

Sponsorship spots can be claimed at any time between now and when the conference begins on August 14th, but the earlier the better. Physical booth space for sponsors at the event is limited, which limits the available sponsorship slots at the higher tiers so claim them early!

Also, the deadline for logo inclusion for our 2026 Lyrical Code T-shirt will be June 30th.

Sponsorship Features

A few items to highlight this year that will be available in various sponsorship levels.

• 20% Discount for Returning Sponsors - Once you start sponsoring the Carolina Code Conference, we hope to see you come back every year. As an incentive, returning sponsors receive a 20% discount on any tier.

• Topic Requests - As a sponsor at the event, you may want to ensure your target audience is in attendance. If you’re hiring for PHP, Cybersecurity, .NET, Java, Rust then it’s more likely your target audience will be in attendance if there’s a speaker covering the subject. While we do not sell speaker slots for the event we do weigh a number of factors during talk selection, including the preferences of our sponsors. If you have a request, just let us know.

• Social Media - We have multiple social media channels and we’re happy to post about your company in various capacities, including tagging your accounts on your preferred platforms. We currently cast a wide net but the number of platforms are rapidly expanding. If you would prefer to see us active on a platform we don’t currently support, please let us know. We’re currently active on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Mastodon and Instagram.

• Conference T-Shirt - Our Lyrical Code T-shirt’s have been a huge hit over the last few years. Conference attendees at the 2025 conference voted and this year’s winner, Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley. Platinum and Gold sponsors will have their logos colorized on the shirt.

  

• Now Hiring Email - Prior to the conference, we will send out an email summarizing available positions from our sponsors who will be in attendance. All paid sponsors (including Bronze Tier) can include positions in this email so that potential candidates may come prepared to speak with you during the event. These will be due 1 week prior to the event.

• Job Board - There will also be a physical marker board where available jobs can be written. Sponsors will get first access to this, but any other attendees will have access to fill in positions if space is available.

• Video Sponsorship - Conference videos will feature your logo and a link to your company. Visit our YouTube channel for examples from the 2023 and 2024 events.

• Booth Space - Booth space is available in our Sponsor Hall. Platinum and Gold sponsors can use up to 3 tables measuring 6’ x 2.5’ table to frame your display area, with 2.5’ diameter high top tables available for our Silver sponsors for your display. Position preferences will be allocated by sponsorship tier and sponsorship date as a tie breaker.

• Attendee List - Conference attendees may elect to provide their contact information, name, organization and position to Platinum and Gold sponsors when they purchase their event ticket. These list will be distributed to sponsors following the conference.

• Conference Chat - Every year we setup a Zulip chat system for conference attendees to interact with each other, speakers and our sponsors. All sponsors will have access to this system to communicate with all attendees.

• Naming Rights - If you have a creative idea for something at the conference that we can put your name on, talk to us about it. If there are hard costs to putting your logo on something like a lanyard, you will be responsible for those. In 2023 we had the Seek Quality Conference Retrospective and the Engineer Kit Lunch Hour, where mentorship and career opportunities were discussed. No guarantees here, but we are open to discussing just about anything to help our sponsors.

Become a Sponsor

Sponsorship Tiers

Bronze Tier (No Limit)

$500 sponsorship. Items in Bold are described in detail above.

• Logo and excerpt on the website with link to your company

• Grayscale logo inclusion on the Conference T-shirt

• Social Media shout outs

• Inclusion on a “Thank You Sponsors!” slide in the opening talk

• 2 Full Tickets (both days, $400 value)

• Inclusion in the Now Hiring email in advance of the conference

Silver Tier (Limit 10)

$2,000 sponsorship. Items in Bold are described in detail above.

• Logo and excerpt on the website with link to your company

• Logo inclusion on monitors throughout the venue during the event

• Grayscale logo inclusion on the Conference T-shirt

• Social Media shout outs, including “be on the lookout for…” style posts just prior to the event by request

• Mention of your company before the introduction of at least one speaker

• Video Sponsorship with company logo and link with at least one speaker video

• Booth Space at the event for company promotion, swag giveaways and interviews via high top table

• Inclusion on the Now Hiring Email and premium access to the physical Job Board

• Topic Requests for programming language, technology or speaker topic consideration during the event

• 6 Full Tickets (both days, $1200 value)

Gold Tier (Limit 4)

$5,000 sponsorship. Items in Bold are described in detail above.

• Logo and excerpt on the website with link to your company

• Logo inclusion on displays throughout the venue during the event

• Color logo inclusion on the Conference T-shirt

• Social Media shout outs, including “be on the lookout for…” style posts just prior to the event by request

• Blog post and Email about your company on the site that will be distributed to our entire mailing list on request

• Mention of your company before the introduction of at least one speaker

• Mention of your company during the conference welcome

• Repeated mentions of your company throughout the conference

• Video Sponsorship with company logo and link on multiple videos

• Booth Space at the event for company promotion, swag giveaways and interviews with up to 3 tables to frame your display area

• Inclusion on the Now Hiring Email and premium access to the physical Job Board

• Topic Requests for programming language, technology or speaker topic consideration during the event

• Naming Rights to an aspect of the conference either during or after conference activities (see above)

• 8 Full Tickets (both days, $1600 value)

Platinum Tier (Limit 2)

$10,000 sponsorship. Items in Bold are described in detail above.

• Color logo inclusion on the Conference T-shirt and the website with link to your company

• Logo inclusion on displays throughout the venue during the event

• Social Media shout outs, including “be on the lookout for…” style posts just prior to the event by request

• Mention of your company before the introduction of at least one speaker

• Mention of your company during the conference welcome

• Repeated mentions of your company throughout the conference

• 5 minutes during either the opening or closing of the conference to Address the Attendees

• Blog post and Email about your company on the site that will be distributed to our entire mailing list on request

• Video Sponsorship with company logo and link on every video

• Premium Booth Space at the event for company promotion, swag giveaways and interviews with up to 3 tables to frame your display

• Inclusion on the Now Hiring Email and premium access to the physical Job Board

• Topic Requests for programming language, technology or speaker topic consideration during the event

• Naming Rights to an aspect of the conference either during or after conference activities (see above)

• 12 Full Tickets (both days, $2400 value)

• Optionally, you may host a Friday Night Event for conference attendees that we will promote as part of the conference itinerary. Last year Vonage held a Happy Hour at New Realm Brewing that was a huge hit!

Become a Sponsor

Thank You!

If you would like to discuss sponsorship opportunities, please reach out to sponsor@carolina.codes. This event cannot happen without your support.

Additionally, we’re always happy to discuss, Community, Media and In-Kind Sponsorship opportunities for organizations who wish to help us promote the event in other ways. Contact us to discuss any ideas that you may have!

*Per the same conference rules for speakers, political sponsorships will not be allowed.

Looking for something to do during the Southern Snowpocalypse of 2026? You may want to put together a conference talk.

The 2025 Carolina Code Conference was a blast, featuring 25 speakers after receiving 318 talks submissions in our two day single track event. A good time was had by all!

Today, we officially announce the 2026 Call for Speakers on Sessionize! We’re a little later than usual getting it opened this year, but we’re still inside of January. The call will be open until March 31st, so you should have plenty of time to get things ready.

After selling out in 25 minutes during the 2023 event, we grew in 2024 to 266 attendees in our first 2 day event as the debut conference at the new Flywheel building in beautiful Greenville, SC. We returned to Flywheel in 2025 and will be back again to this incredible venue this year in 2026 on August 14th and 15th.

Tickets on Sale Now!

Within 3 hours we can easily reach Charlotte, NC, Atlanta, GA, Augusta, GA, Charleston, SC and Knoxville, TN. Extending our reach to this entire quad state region is a major focus and the reason why we keep coming to your meetup groups! We even put together a video invitation. Seriously.

As a speaker, our goal is to promote and amplify you. You can look forward to a committed single track event where you will be speaking to everyone in attendance. All talks are professionally recorded and published online.

Each selected speaker will receive 2 tickets to the event so that you may bring a guest if you wish.

It's going to be a good time and we hope you join us!

Submit a Talk

Talk Format and Length

Each speaker can submit up to 3 presentations and each presentation can apply for multiple time slots (5-10 minute lightning, 15-30 minute moderate, 45-60 minute keynote). If you have a talk that can be adjusted for length, you can select each length with a single submission and we highly encourage you to do so. Last year out of 30 speakers we had 5 keynotes, 10 intermediate and 15 lightning talks.

Topics range from Programming and Software Development, DevSecOps, Cybersecurity, Product Development, Career and more! We’re always interested in highlighting technologies that are more obscure, less mainstream, combine technologies for unique benefits or potentially actively used but maybe not as popular as they once were (Perl, COBOL, etc). Any talk that fills a gap which wasn’t covered in the prior year will also get some special consideration as well. If you are passionate about it, that passion will come through in your talk.

Single Track Commitment

Even with our growth, we're committed to remaining a single track conference where each speaker will have access to address the entire group of attendees with their passion.

Rather than a multi-track format where you may have to worry about winning your time slot once selected, we stagger the length of talks throughout the day in order to keep the audience engaged so speakers are asked to submit talks for multiple length formats: Keynote (45-60 minutes), Moderate (20-30 minutes) or Lightning (5-10 minutes). Keynote talks will open the day and follow our lunch hour, while Moderate length and Lightning talks will alternate throughout each day (2023 schedule for example).

If a speaker drops out at the last minute, we may reach out to you to increase the length of your talk to fill the slot. This format was very well received last year.

Social Media Promotions

If you have anything going on professionally that you'd like us to share on social media, we will be happy to do so. Again, our goal is the amplify you. Just ask. We're planning to utilize a more focused marketing budget for this year's event to amplify and focus our social media presence. We're most active on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon (since March 2023) and YouTube (since September 2023).

Travel Assistance

Unfortunately, we have not historically had the budget to provide travel assistance but are happy to promote your company as a sponsor if they will cover it for you. More details will be provided if your talk is selected. We have already renewed our block of rooms at Aloft Downtown Greenville. You can find more details on our Event Details & Registration page.

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  { message: "The world is going to roll you" });

(for some Tool of Shed => Me.Sharpness < Tool.Sharpness)   -- Ada

var she = new Woman {                                      // C#         
  Expression = Dumb.Level["kinda"],
  ForeheadAdornment = HandGesture.LShape };

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rules |> Seq.iter (fun r -> hit(ground, Running))          // F#

?- liveFor(notFun), false.                                 %! Prolog

def adjust(brain, head, inc), do:                          # Elixir
  { %{brain | smart: brain.smart + inc},
  %{head | dumb: head.dumb - inc} }

// More in Python, SQL, PHP, Rust, COBOL, Pony, Java, Ruby, C++ and Perl!

Sizing charts are available on the size drop down on their website.

The good folks at The Graphic Cow have setup a link for orders that we will leave open until February 1st when our secondary printing will begin.

Order your 2025 T-shirt Now!

If you did attend the conference and we ran out of shirts in your size, we have your information already and will be sending out those shirts along with this printing. No need to do anything else there.

Never Gonna Give You Up…

And while we have your attention on T-shirts, go ahead and start Submitting your Pull Requests for the 2026 T-shirt, turning Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” lyrics into code in your favorite programming languages! PR’s due by June 1st, 2026!

Visit the Github Repo

Get your code immortalized on this year’s Lyrical Code T-shirt!

Thank you Sponsors!

Our Incredible 2025 Sponsors made this outstanding event possible! Please give a huge thank you to Platinum Sponsor Flywheel Coworking, who hosted this year’s event and Platinum Sponsor Vonage who put on the Friday Happy Hour at New Realm Brewing, while also sharing some…travel adventures!

The welcoming environment created by our 254 attendees made it so special; during both days at Flywheel and the social events at the Welcome Social at Gather GVL, the New Realm Brewing Happy Hour by Vonage, the conference wind down at Fireforge and even the Sunday morning brunch at BrickTop’s for the folks who hung around.

Who knows what will come from the new friendships and professional connections y’all made this year?

Here are some of the highlights from 2025. We will have full features in the coming weeks around several of these events, as well as features on several of our sponsors so stay tuned!

The Jim Ciallella “Jimmy C” Award

This year we created an annual award for Service to the Southeast Tech Community and named it in honor of Jim Ciallella, one of our hardest working and most selfless contributors for approximately 20 years. We also back filled the award, giving out one for each of the 5 years the Carolina Code Conference has existed: 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

As we talked through the reasons for the award and how we all knew the people that make up the glue of our local tech communities from Augusta to Asheville, Charlotte to Atlanta, Charleston to Knoxville and more…the conference audience was almost uniformly smiling and nodding along.

Nominate for Your Community!

A full feature of the award, it’s purpose and long term goals, including video of the recipients, will be coming soon. In the mean time, you can begin Submitting Nominations for the Jim Ciallella Award for Outstanding Service to the Southeast Tech Community right now!

We’ve Been “Rickrolled”

2025 attendees placed their nominations on the tickets. On Friday, you voted to narrow down the songs to a top 4. On Saturday, it was finalized. The winner of the Lyrical Code Challenge for the 2026 Carolina Code Conference T-shirt is Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

The moment it appeared in the nominations I think we all knew what was about to happen…we got Rickrolled.

Visit our Github repo to start submitting entries in your favorite languages today! We will close entries to finalize the t-shirt on June 15th.

2025 Speakers Were Awesome!

Our 25 Speakers on one stage over 2 days gave us engaging education, entertainment and broadened all of our horizons. All talks were recorded and are LIVE on our on the Carolina Code Conference YouTube channel, in the 2025 Playlist ( along with 2024 and 2023) thanks to the pros over at Aaron Pate Media!

Thank You to Our Volunteers!

No part of this event happens without the support of our amazing volunteer team handling every detail from check-in, sponsor setup, food, setup & cleanup. Thank you all for giving of your time to make this event run so smoothly!

Photos from True Light Photography

The entire library of photos from Phillip Guyton’s True Light Photography are available on his Smug Mug [ originals & some v2 edits ], where they were posted live as they were taken! Feel free to download and use any of these personally or privately, on your social media or otherwise. These memories are recorded for everyone!

We’ll be sharing plenty of our favorites on our (shameless plug) Instagram, X and LinkedIn accounts! A lot of them were shared on Instagram as the conference was happening too!

2026 Tickets On Sale Now!

Everything about this conference is an experiment. We try things, get feedback and adapt…some would call it…agile.

One of the staples for the past 3 years has been the attendee early access ticket. We’ve held that attendees from a prior year would get 20% discounted, early access tickets to the following year’s conference. Unfortunately, a lot of logistical issues were created by trying to do things that way so this year we are doing something new…

Get Your 2026 Ticket NOW!

Tickets for the 2026 Carolina Code Conference, August 14th and 15th 2026 at Flywheel in Greenville, are On Sale NOW! Early access tickets are discounted by 20% until April 1st, 2026 for EVERYBODY at which point all tickets will pivot to the our standard General Admission tickets…until t-shirts get printed. Full details available!

Recap Posts from 2025 Attendees

A number of attendees this year were gracious enough to share their experiences at the conference on blogs and social media. We’ve linked all of the ones that we saw here for anyone who may be curious. Thank you all!

From Sponsors

• Vonage - LinkedIn & Blog

• STEM Search Group

• Simply Binary

• Build Carolina (with video!)

• Manning Publications

From Attendees

• Ben Link

• Jen Bauer

• Justin Nash

• Ryan Fields

• Gwen Murtha

• Nerando Johnson

• Ram Bala

• Aaron Pate

• Justin Jones

• Ben Overcash (with an e-ink badge)

• Andrew MacLean - [ X & LinkedIn ]

• Diana Pham - LinkedIn [ AI Greenville Visit, Photos, How was my talk?, Who’d I Meet?, Hallways Chats ]

What’s next for 2026!

In the next couple of weeks you can expect a flurry because we’re playing catch up from a busy Fall. The 2026 Call for Speakers, Call for Sponsors, results of this year’s 2025 Advent of Code challenge and the Jim Ciallella Award with more details will be on their way soon.

Follow our social accounts where we will happily promote any tech Meetup Events in the Quad State Region (South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia). Don’t hesitate to reach out directly (email or LinkedIn) if there’s a major event in your community that you would like to get some extra attention!

See you next year!

It’s time for the annual Carolina Code Conference Advent of Code Challenge again this year! You’ll have the opportunity to flex your brain and learn while you have the opportunity to win tickets for you and maybe some friends too!

Here are the details from last year’s challenge and the winners announcement in case you’re curious.

UPDATE: This post initially referenced 50 possible stars based on prior years. There are only 12 puzzles this year, meaning 24 possible stars. The post has been updated.

What is Advent of Code?

Direct from adventofcode.com…

Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

As regular participant in Advent of Code for many years now, our own Eric Burden has even run a blog series annually discussing the event and what he loves about it so much.

How do I participate?

We’re going to have a little more brevity in this year’s announcement to simplify things. The Carolina Code Conference has created a private leaderboard for the event, which you can view right here. If you joined the board last year, you should already be on it.

Join the Private Leaderboard…

• Login to your Advent of Code account with Github, Google, Twitter or Reddit

• Visit the Private Leaderboard page

• Join using the code 3225403-6028c4d6

• Email barry@carolina.codes with a link to the Github Repo that you’ll be using for the challenges. In order to be eligible for prizes you must email me so that I know how to contact you.

This year, the prizes will be as follows…

1. 1st place will earn THREE tickets to the 2026 Carolina Code Conference

2. 2nd place will earn TWO tickets

3. 3rd place will earn ONE ticket

4. Polyglot Raffle
   Earn at least two Gold stars with different programming languages and you’ll be entered into a raffle to win ONE free ticket. Every Gold star earned with an additional language will earn you an additional entry.

5. Weirdest Language
   Earn a Gold star using a language that either nobody else was using OR is sufficiently low on assorted language popularity indexes and you could win a free ticket. This is entirely based on judges discretion.

6. Best Visualization
   Most years, Advent of Code will include some type of challenge that includes a visualization of some type. Email some photo evidence to us after your challenge to be considered by the judges.

7. Annoyingly Proactive Social Media Promoter!
   Are you participating in Advent of Code while constantly posting about the Carolina Code Conference on your social media platform of choice? AWESOME. Keep that up and tag us in your posts. We’ll give away at least one ticket on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and YouTube! Every post we see from you (up to 1 per day) will enter you in a raffle for that social media platform. Email us to let us know your username on the platform so that we know who’s doing it.
   
   We want to see you posting about us so much that we think, “Wow…that person’s followers must be getting REALLY tired of hearing about the Carolina Code Conference…SWEET!”

8. If you complete at least 8 of 24 stars, you will get early access to 2026 Carolina Code Conference tickets and a 20% discount.

Have Fun and Learn!

Remember, the point of these challenges is to have fun and learn. Many people use Advent of Code as a way to learn a new language. Others, just enjoy the brain puzzles.

But it’s a puzzle for your brain, not the computer’s. Please refrain from solving puzzles by copying other folks solutions or using AI to solve it for you. It’s against the spirit of the contest.

Checkout our podcast with Eric Burden who inspired this event by sharing his prior experiences with Advent of Code over the year! Happy coding!

Checkout the full list and descriptions on our announcement page!

Place your votes!

Cast your votes!

It’s hard to believe we have finally reached conference week! We have a great experience lined up for you so feel free to treat this as a reference post for your travels.

Don’t forget to thank Our Amazing Sponsors who make this event possible!

Tickets Available Until Wednesday 8/13

Quick Note: There has been a slight shakeup to the speaker schedule this year as 3 speakers let us know that they would not be able to attend over the last month. We’ve accounted for this by allowing additional time for some of our other speakers.

• Sarah Matta’s talk “Number Sense for Programmers: The Hidden Math You Already Use” is now a Keynote

• Redvers Davies talk “Fast, Concurrent, Secure, Correct Actors…and a pony!” is now an Intermediate Talk

• Jake Hendley’s talk “Software in the EV space” is now an Intermediate Talk

Checkout the full lineup!

Here’s what we’re going to cover…

Throughout your visit

• Tag us on social media

• Conference Chat with Zulip

• 10% off at WantecVR

Thursday - 8/14

• Staying at Aloft Downtown Greenville

• Coworking at OpenWorks

• Welcome Social at Gather GVL

Friday - 8/15

• Parking at Flywheel Coworking

• Hotel Transport between Aloft and Flywheel

• Conference Check-In Schedule

• DEF CON 864 Capture the Flag

• Lunch Buffet from Tropical Grille

• Vonage Happy Hour at New Realm Brewing

Saturday - 8/16

• Conference Schedule

• Boxed Lunch from Honey Baked Ham

• Wind down at Fireforge Crafted Beer

Sunday - 8/17

• Brunch at BrickTop’s

• Sadness that it’s over…until 2026

Throughout your visit

Tag us on social media

Seriously…we need those sweet, sweet likes! Tell everyone about what an awesome time you’re having! Share your pictures and videos but remember to tag us @CodesCarolina on LinkedIn, X, Instagram & YouTube!

Conference Chat with Zulip

If you have a ticket to the conference, then you should have also received an invitation to the Zulip conference chat either directly from Zulip or from Tito where you purchased your tickets. Zulip is an open source chat alternative to Slack & Discord. All attendees to the conference are encouraged to get signed up and install the mobile app (iOS | Android) to make it easier to interact with other conference attendees.

We have channels setup for 2025 where you can interact with speakers (#2025-talks), sponsors (#2025-sponsors), post job openings to engage attendees (#2025-job-board), find attendees with similar interests (#2025-birds-of-a-feather), talk about events happening outside of the venue (#2025-on-the-town) or discuss the DEF CON 864 Capture the Flag event (#2025-dc864-ctf).

You can share photos, speakers may share slides or answer question, even create your own private channels for you and some of your new friends!

The chat stays up year round, so you can always use it to follow up. If you have attended in the past but can’t make it this year, you can still feel free to sign on during the conference to interact with everyone there.

10% off at WantecVR

From August 14th - 17th, WantecVR in downtown Greenville is offering 10% off to all Carolina Code Conference attendees.

Our place is the ultimate entertainment destination in downtown Greenville! Whether you’re a racing enthusiast, a VR adventurer, or just looking to have a great time with friends, we’ve got something for everyone.

We offer free-roam VR games, racing simulators, a media lounge for VR escape rooms, regular VR games, watch parties, and Rock Band sessions. We also have free-to-play gaming consoles (Switch, Wii, PS1, Xbox) scattered around the bar, a full menu, and an awesome beer and liquor selection.

I tried out the racing simulator and it’s intense! Compete with up to 12 friends.

An all around great time for adult gamers and right around the corner from GatherGVL and New Realm Brewing when you’re looking to keep the night going!

Thursday - 8/14

Staying at Aloft Downtown Greenville

If you’re staying at the beautiful Aloft hotel in downtown Greenville, you’re right in the middle of the action! The hotel has a parking garage attached and check-in is on the 4th floor.

It’s conveniently located near numerous restaurants and attractions in downtown Greenville, including OpenWorks right next door, Fireforge Crafted Beer 2 blocks away and BrickTop’s for Sunday brunch on the same block. You’ll stroll from the hotel through beautiful downtown Greenville, passing Fall’s Park on the way to Gather GVL for the Thursday night Welcome Social and New Realm Brewing Happy Hour by Vonage on Friday night.

Coworking at OpenWorks

OpenWorks has generously offered to open their doors on Thursday for anyone in town for the conference who’s looking for somewhere to work for the day. Just give them a heads up if you plan to be there by registering on this form.

They’ll plan to have lunch there between 12 - 1:30, let you work all day, have a social at 4:30 and then walk together down to the Welcome Social at GatherGVL.

Welcome Social at Gather GVL

We’ve reserved the entire upstairs at Gather GVL for this year’s welcome social from 6-8pm. You’re welcome to get there earlier and stay later of course. It’s a great way to relax and visit with other people coming to the conference without all of the conference activities going on at the same time.

Gather GVL has numerous different options for food/beverages and we will also have a cake for the conference upstairs. We booked the space, but the food is up to you.

And yes, we will have name tags.

Friday - 8/15

Parking at Flywheel Coworking

Flywheel Coworking is an incredible venue located just off of the Poinsett Highway at 25 Goldsmith St, Greenville, SC 29609. That is the address that you should use for drop-off or Uber/Lyft drivers.

The parking lot for the facility is located at 701 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, SC where you will see signs for the Crescent ONE building. There is a helpful map and diagram on our Event Details & Registration page.

There is no charge for parking at the venue.

Hotel Transport between Aloft and Flywheel

We have hired a driver who will be transporting people from Aloft to Flywheel and back. He will be running every few minutes at the beginning and end of the conference each day.

• Friday from 7:30am - 9am and 4:45pm - 5:45pm

• Saturday from 8am - 9am and 4:45pm - 5:45pm

If you are staying at Aloft, you will get more details via email the day before the event.

Conference Check-In Schedule

Doors open at Flywheel at 7:30am, the conference opening will begin at 8:30am and Our Speakers will kick things off at 9am.

When you arrive, you’ll check in with one of our volunteers who will verify your ticket, give you your conference badge and 2025 t-shirt. After that, come visit our sponsors, enjoy some coffee & snacks, check-in with DC864 for the CTF if you want to try it out and make some new friends.

We strongly advise arriving no later than 8am on the first day!

DEF CON 864 Capture the Flag (CTF)

As part of our commitment to cybersecurity and for the 3rd year in a row, the good folks from DEF CON 864 will be running a CTF during the conference. In 2023 the winner earned a Flipper Zero. In 2024 it the prize was a complete Raspberry Pi 5 kit.

This year’s winner will walk away with a Night School Tuxedo Edition Lock Pick Set from SPARROWS Lock Picks and a LAN Tap Pro from Hacker Warehouse!

If you’re a CTF veteran or are just looking to try it for the first time, this competition is for you. The contest is tailored to programmers and first time participants, where you’ll have to use your hacking skills to capture privileged information from people and systems. You might even learn to pick a lock!

Bring your laptop to hack along throughout the day.

Lunch Buffet from Tropical Grille

Back by popular demand is our build-a-bowl lunch buffet from Tropical Grille. Combine rice, beans, sauce, cheese, veggies and/or chicken to your liking into a delicious meal that meets any dietary needs.

Vonage Happy Hour at New Realm Brewing

The wonderful folks from Vonage (2025 Platinum Sponsor), will be throwing a happy hour Friday evening after the conference from 5:30 - 7:30pm at New Realm Brewing. The first 100 attendees will be treated to a variety of appetizers & h'orderves as well as some free adult beverages to go with great company for the evening.

Every New Realm brewery/distillery and taproom is unique, and each has a distinct focus. New Realm Greenville is located at the iconic Cigar Warehouse at 912 S. Main, and its focus is on barrel-aging and blending our beautiful beers into something wholly unique.

Grab a drink from one of several bars and take a seat in our main bar, speakeasy, or our outdoor beer garden. We’re serving Brewmaster Mitch Steele’s famous IPAs and Pilsners plus barrel-aged brews perfected on-site alongside hand-crafted cocktails featuring New Realm Spirits in a family friendly indoor + outdoor environment. Pair your favorites with our classic New Realm Burger or Greenville’s best wood-fired pizza.

Even after 7:30, you’re welcome to hang around as long as you like. It’s always a good time at New Realm Brewing!

Thank you Vonage!

Saturday - 8/16

Conference Schedule

Doors open at 8am on Saturday, we’ll do a short welcome back at 8:45am and Our Speakers will get things moving at 9am.

If you have a single day ticket or haven’t already checked in, you’ll see one of our volunteers who will get you your badge and 2025 Lyrical Code T-shirt! As always, coffee and snacks will be available.

Boxed Lunch from Honey Baked Ham

Saturday we’ll have an assortment of delicious boxed lunches from Honey Baked Ham. We’ll have boxed lunches with either Ham, Turkey or California Veggie (cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, lettuce and avocado) sandwiches, as well as some Gluten Friendly wraps and even a few Chef Salad’s to accommodate various dietary needs. Each boxed lunch is served with assorted chips and a cookie, while the Gluten Friendly boxes come with a gluten free brownie.

Wind down at Fireforge Crafted Beer

Once the conference ends, attendees are encouraged to make their way over to Fireforge in downtown Greenville for some good food and award winning brews!

Located in downtown Greenville, SC, Fireforge Crafted Beer is a small-batch craft brewery, tasting room and pleasure garden focused on ever-changing beers inspired by the people, places and culinary palates we love.

Show your conference badge to get 10% off food and beverages all night.

Sunday - 8/17

Brunch at BrickTop’s

If you’re hanging around until Sunday and would like to grab brunch before hitting the road, join us at 10am at BrickTop’s, right around the corner from the Aloft Hotel. Shoot over an email to barry@carolina.codes if you plan to attend so that I can ensure the reservation size is correct.

Sadness that it’s over…until 2026

We get it! It’s going to be rough having to wait an entire year for the 2026 Carolina Code Conference!

We can make that wait easier if you follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and YouTube where we will be sharing pictures, videos, shorts and information for 2026 including the Call for Speakers and the Advent of Code contest for tickets.

Event Details & Registration

A funny thing happened though. Although we traveled to attend numerous groups in person, the best response last year came from making a short video at my desk that was shared with a couple of other groups.

With that in mind, our video team from Aaron Pate Media helped us to put together a more formal invitation. If you are involved with or regularly attend a meetup group in the Quad State area (NC, SC, TN, GA), please take a couple of minutes to show this video to your attendees and then give them the discount code below that matches your state for 20% off!

UPDATE - We added Virginia, Florida and Alabama too! Bama fans may wish to observe caution.

• SC25

• NC25

• TN25

• GA25

• VA25

• FL25

• AL25

In the past, we have tried to give each Meetup its own promo code but because the conference is a little over a month away, we setup four codes right here for you to use.

Make sure to let participants know to register sooner rather than later so we can make sure to prepare a t-shirt in their size and take into account any dietary restrictions for the conference meals.

If you do end up sharing this video with your Meetup group, please shoot over an email to let me know if you have any feedback barry@carolina.codes.

Full details and itinerary can be found at our Event Details and Registration page. As always, give a big thank you to Our Sponsors!

Visit our Github Repo for Details

Every year, we vote to select a song for our Lyrical Code Challenge and then collect your entries turning the song lyrics into readable code in your favorite language. We’ll mix them all up and create a polyglot t-shirt that you can’t help but sing as you read it!

Last year’s shirt even included code that would generate sheet music and a MIDI guitar solo!

In 2023 it was Don’t Stop Believing by Journey. In 2024 we covered Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

In 2025, you’re an All Star by Smash Mouth! Go get those entries in because we will be finalizing this year’s t-shirt for printing by July 10th, so we need everyone’s entries by July 1st.

Make sure your favorite language is represented. The more obscure the better!

Let your code sing on our Github Repo!

Every attendee has a shirt included with their ticket as well, so if you haven’t yet go get your ticket to make sure we get your size!

2025 Event Details and Registration

The conference is getting closer and it’s time to start thinking about volunteers for the big day. Here’s how volunteering works at the Carolina Code Conference.

We have 4 shifts over 2 days and we’re looking for 3 volunteers to be available for each shift.

• Friday Morning

• Friday Afternoon

• Saturday Morning

• Saturday Afternoon

The morning and afternoon shifts will overlap during lunch when we need all hands on deck to feed 300 people. We also ask that any volunteers who are available at the conference close on Saturday help us out with cleanup.

Duties include being ready, willing and able to help with the assortment of things that may come up on conference day but the bulk of the responsibility is helping out with check in, helping with the lunch hour and helping with cleanup.

Outside of your shift, please go and enjoy the conference.

Volunteers get a free ticket to the event, a really cool t-shirt and a big thank you from everyone involved.

If you are interested in volunteering, please email barry@carolina.codes and let me know which shifts you would prefer, as well as your t-shirt size.

Thank you to everyone who helps this event come together!

Tickets are on sale now to the 2025 Carolina Code Conference, the Polyglot and Cybersecurity Conference for All Who Code, coming to Flywheel Coworking in beautiful Greenville, SC on August 15th and 16th!

Get My Ticket Now

Once you have purchased your tickets, be sure to have them assigned to whoever will be using it so that person can complete the questions for the ticket. These questions include important details such as dietary restrictions, t-shirts sizes and whether hotel accommodations will be needed so we can send you the link to the room block.

For full details about the event, schedule, entertainment, lodging, speakers, the Thursday night welcome social and more visit our Event Details & Registration page!

Check out our Speakers

We have an Amazing lineup of 29 speakers this year from all over. We have talks on AI, Data, Cybersecurity, Gaming, Fundamentals, DevOps, Psychology and even your Career. For the Polyglot we have talks covering Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, COBOL (finally!), Zig, F#, Pony, QuickBASIC, QB64, Elixir, Java, Rust and more!

Thanks to Our Sponsors

Without Our Great Sponsors, this event would not be possible so please give them a look, follow, visit and shout out to let them know how much we appreciate their support!

Unleash on the Lyrical Code T-shirt!

In 2023 it was Don’t Stop Believing. In 2024 we made Bohemian Rhapsody. This year, you’re an All Star! Turn the lyrics into code in your favorite programming language. You can do the entire song or just an inspired verse. We’ll combine your entries into a polyglot t-shirt that you can help but sing while you read!

Submit your Pull Requests by July 1st to be included!

DEF CON 864 brings back Capture the Flag

The crew from DC864 will be back for the 3rd year in a row running another CTF competition all throughout the conference. If you’re a CTF veteran or are just looking to try it for the first time, the competition has been a hit each year. This year’s winner will walk away with a Night School Tuxedo Edition Lock Pick Set from SPARROWS Lock Picks and a LAN Tap Pro from Hacker Warehouse!

Just be careful. You never know when the Social Engineering portion will create some controversy….

Contact me directly if you expected to receive this message and haven’t yet.

Tickets on Sale June 12th!

For anyone who has been awarded tickets through various offseason opportunities like Advent of Code or hackathon events, I will be distributing those tickets this week.

Volunteers for the conference will be refunded their ticket price when the time comes.

If you did not receive that link and were expecting to, please let me know.

Get Tickets on June 12th!

General Admission tickets will go on on Thursday, June 12th, 2025.

Subscribe now

2025 is a big year for the speaker selections as the talk submissions were so strong that we had to rearrange the speaker schedule a little bit to better accommodate what we were seeing. Here’s a quick comparison of the distribution from 2023 to 2025 across Keynote, Intermediate and Lightning Talks submitted.

Get Tickets on June 12th!

In 2023 and 2024, the distribution across categories remained relatively equal. For 2025, we saw a huge shift receiving 170 Intermediate length submissions compared to 84 Keynotes and 64 Lightning Talks. This made the Intermediate category more competitive than it’s ever been.

The quality of submissions across all categories was stellar this year as almost every talk could have easily qualified. In order to adjust to this reality, we removed a Keynote spot and some Lightning Talk spots in order to make room for more Intermediate Talks. In 2024 we had 10 Intermediate length talks. For 2025, we made room for 14!

For the first time, we had a selection committee involved to help rank and compare the slate of talks to make narrowing the field a little bit easier. Thank you Kevin Dees, Luke Kapustka, Olivia Sculley and Robert Roskam for taking the time to meticulously review this year’s submissions!

It’s a fantastic lineup this year. We have talks on AI, Data, Cybersecurity, Gaming, Fundamentals, DevOps, Psychology and even your Career. For the Polyglot we have talks covering Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, COBOL (finally!), Zig, F#, Pony, QuickBASIC, QB64, Elixir, Java, Rust and more!

Quick Notes

We need your help with our Lyrical Code T-shirt!

We still need your help to make this year’s t-shirt really sing! Take your best shot at converting “All Star” by Smash Mouth (as chosen by you!) into code you can sing in your favorite language. Checkout the Github Repo and submit a PR. Checkout our 2024 Bohemian Rhapsody and 2023 Don’t Stop Believing shirts for some inspiration!

You can enter as little as a single verse or a the entire song but give it a try. We’ll combine lines in different languages to make our polyglot t-shirt that you can’t help but sing when you read.

Get your game on. Go play. You’re a rock star! Break the mold…

DEF CON 864 will again run a Capture the Flag

For the 3rd year in a row the team from DC864 will run a CTF throughout the conference for you to flex your hacking skills. As always, we’ll have a prize for the winner. If you’ve never participated one, it’s a great opportunity to experience it for the first time!

Just remember, sometimes they will incorrectly suggest that one of my answers is an opinion. It has happened before (Go Tigers).

Tickets Coming Soon

Next week will begin our early access tickets for prior year attendees, followed by the public release 1 month later. Don’t forget to subscribe to be informed as it happens!

Without further ado, here are…

Your 2025 Carolina Code Conference Speakers!

Keep scrolling for full profiles and session overviews.

// Friday Talks

WITH friday_talks AS ( -- PostgreSQL w/ CTE
    SELECT speaker, title, format, scheduled_at
    FROM talks
    WHERE DATE(scheduled_at) = '2025-08-15'
)
SELECT * FROM friday_talks ORDER BY scheduled_at;

morning.summary()

• 9:00am // Trey Grainger - AI-Powered Search: Exploring the Algorithms Measuring (and Shaping) How We Think #keynote

• 10:00am // Larry Maccherone - Godfather Security: How Development Can Make an Offer that Security Can't Refuse #intermediate

• 10:30am // David Mackey - Retro Coding with QB64 #intermediate

• 11:00am // Andrew MacLean - Turning Over a New Leaf: An Elegant PHP Framework for Modern Web Development #intermediate

• 11:30am // Ruthie Ballenger - Using an Anti Corruption Layer to Migrate Legacy Data #intermediate

• 12:00pm // Houston Haynes - Firefly - an F# compiler goes native to CPU, GPU and beyond #intermediate

afternoon.summary()

• 1:30pm // Blake Coleman - How AI is Reshaping Hiring, Job Searching, and Your Career #intermediate

• 2:00pm // Doug Cone - Beyond Play: Modding Games for Real-World Tech Skills #intermediate

• 2:30pm // Karl Groves - Everything you need to know about JavaScript accessibility #intermediate

• 3:00pm // James Lowden - The Once and Future COBOL #intermediate

• 3:30pm // Nerando Johnson - And It Was Written ~ An Introspective in the Importance of ReadMes #lightning

• 3:45pm // Sarah Matta - Number Sense for Programmers: The Hidden Math You Already Use #keynote

// Saturday Talks

query { # GraphQL
  saturdayTalks: talks(
    where: { scheduled_at: { _eq: "2025-08-16" } }
    order_by: { scheduled_at: asc }
  ) {
    speaker, title, format, scheduled_at
  }
}

morning.summary()

• 9:00am // Matt "Kelly" Williams - Putting the FUN back in Fundamentals: Data Structures, Algorithms, and More! #keynote

• 10:00am // Joel Taddei - Lark and Load: Parsing with Python #intermediate

• 10:30am // Sagar Suri - Current Events: Lessons Learned Streaming 14 Trillion Daily Telemetry Events #lightning

• 10:45am // Ethan Foulkes - 10 words for building software successfully. #intermediate

• 11:15am // Nate Argaw - Drawing with Math - Pixel Shaders #lightning

• 11:30am // Sam Ruby - Using Kamal 2.0 in Production #intermediate

• 12:00pm // Redvers Davies - Fast, Concurrent, Secure, Correct Actors… and a pony! #intermediate

afternoon.summary()

• 1:30pm // Kevin Ferretti - Reading the Minds We Create #intermediate

• 2:00pm // Diana Pham - Beyond Badges: The Biology & Psychology Behind Effective Gamification in Mobile Apps #intermediate

• 2:30pm // Zach Daniel - Building on Bedrock: Elixir's Fundamental Design Advantage #intermediate

• 3:00pm // Louis Burroughs - Throughput in Software Development #lightning

• 3:15pm // Jake Hendley - Software in the EV space #intermediate

• 3:45pm // Duncan Michel - Regex for Fun and Profit #keynote

// Full Profiles

Trey Grainger |> Greenville, SC

Author: AI-Powered Search, Founder @ Searchkernel

Social: [ @treygrainger, LinkedIn, Blog, SearchKernel, Sessionize ]

Books: [ AI-Powered Search, Solr in Action ]

TREY GRAINGER is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. He is also the co-author of Solr in Action (Manning, 2014), the leading book on Apache Solr. Trey has over 18 years of experience in search and data science, including significant work developing semantic search, personalization, and recommendation systems, and building self-learning search platforms leveraging content and behavior-based reflected intelligence. This work resulted in the publication of dozens of research papers, journal articles, conference presentations, and books at the cutting edge of intelligent search systems.

Keynote // AI-Powered Search: Exploring the Algorithms Measuring (and Shaping) How We Think

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning ]

Languages: [ Python, Java ]

Framework/Platform: [ Search Engines, Vector Databases, LLMs, RAG, Generative AI ]

Every day, AI algorithms are helping you find information, recommending content to you, and learning about your interests and preferences in the process. With the rise of generative AI, the prevalence of these AI-powered search algorithms is growing exponentially. They are now helping generative AI to hold conversations, produce valuable work (planning, writing, coding, creating, conversing, assisting, etc.), and automate away significant amounts of work that can - depending on one’s context, either displace their job or significantly increase their productivity.

In this talk, Trey Grainger, author of the recently published book AI-Powered Search (aipoweredsearch.com), will dive into what these AI-powered retrieval algorithms are, how they work, and the growing influence they have over our daily lives in terms of how we spend our time, what information we see, and how our perceptions are shaped. We’ll discuss some key algorithms and AI models you may have never heard of, like click models, signals boosting, collaborative filtering, LLMs (large language models), semantic knowledge graphs, RAG (retrieval augmented generation), transformer and diffusion models, and multimodal vector search. We’ll cover a high-level overview of how these algorithms work, how they impact us on a daily basis, and how you can also leverage them in your own work.

Larry Maccherone |> Raleigh, NC

Couples Counseling between Security and Engineering

Social: [ LinkedIn, Transformation.dev, Sessionize ]

Larry Maccherone is a DevSecOps/Shift-Left/Dev-centric Security and Development improvement pioneer.

At Comcast, Larry launched and scaled the DevSecOps Transformation program over five years by safely empowering 600 development teams to take ownership of the security of their products. Larry was a founding Director at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, researching cybersecurity and software engineering. While there, he co-led the launch of the DHS-funded Build-Security-In initiative. Larry has also served as Principal Investigator for the NSA's Code Assessment Methodology Project, which wrote the book on evaluating application security tools and received the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Labs Fellow award.

Larry firmly believes in learning by doing so in his spare time; he is the author of a dozen open source projects, one of which gets a million downloads per month.

Intermediate // Godfather Security: How Development Can Make an Offer that Security Can't Refuse

Category: [ DevSecOps, Cybsersecurity, Development ]

There is the way development really functions and there is the way security believes development functions. In most organizations, the two don’t match.

Join DevSecOps pioneer Larry Maccherone for an enlightening guide - tried and tested with scaling security in 600 dev teams - that engineering can use to “make a deal” with security so the two functions align more closely. You will hear thoughts on what true Developer-First Security could look like; what practices and tools provide better risk reductions; how productivity doesn’t need to be hampered by security; and, how security can be scaled in engineering terms.

Nate Argaw |> Greenville, SC

Creative Technologist

Social: [ @shader_daily, LinkedIn, Instagram, Shader Daily, Blog, Sessionize ]

Nate Argaw is a freelance creative technologist with a passion for crafting immersive experiences on the web. Specializing in 3D rendering, he create captivating games and interactive visualizations using WebGL/Three.js. Nate also enjoys experimenting daily with computer graphics through GLSL shaders, pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology.

Lightning // Drawing with Math - Pixel Shaders

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ GLSL ]

Framework/Platform: [ Three.js ]

Shaders are prevalent across all types of media. Whether it is movies, animation or video games, shaders have a prominent role in creating and elevating the entertainment experience. This talk will introduce the audience to writing shader programs. The talk will cover a brief history of shaders, the role of the GPU and parallel processing, pixel shaders and the role of math and the GLSL language. Furthermore, the talk will explore the idea of using functions as paint brushes, signed distance fields (SDFs), combining and coloring SDFs. The talk will emphasize the role of shaders in artistic expression and how to get started learning the magical art of shaders.

Andrew MacLean |> Victoria, Canada

Staff Developer Educator at Twilio

Social: [ @andrewdmaclean, LinkedIn, Blog, Twilio, Sessionize ]

Meetup: [ #Leaf #Community ]

Andrew is equal parts tech enthusiast, educator, and the kind of person who can’t resist pressing buttons just to see what happens (sometimes even twice). A former classroom teacher with nearly a decade of experience crafting learning experiences for techies of all ages, he traded chalkboards for the keyboards of the tech industry in 2020 and hasn’t looked back. Since then, he’s worn many hats—Community Manager, Developer Advocate, and now Developer Educator at Twilio—where he helps developers connect the dots between imagination and implementation. When he’s not building (or breaking :sweat_smile:) things with tech, you’ll find Andrew soaking up the west coast vibes on Vancouver Island, Canada—where he tries (and often fails) to look outdoorsy.

Intermediate // Turning Over a New Leaf in PHP

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ PHP ]

Framework/Platform: [ Leaf PHP ]

In the ever-growing forest of frameworks that shape modern web development, Laravel stands tall—a towering redwood that reflects the strength of the PHP ecosystem. But just as forests depend on giant trees for structure, it’s the small, nimble leaves that capture sunlight, fuel growth, and keep the system thriving.

Enter Leaf: an elegant PHP framework built for speed, simplicity, and flexibility. In this talk, we’ll explore how Leaf empowers developers to build modern applications with less overhead and more control. Whether you're a Laravel loyalist or simply searching for a fresh perspective, it might be time to turn over a new Leaf.

Redvers Davies |> Charlotte, NC

Polyglot, Professional InfoSec Troubleseeker, and diaeresis activist.

Red is a full-time InfoSec Troubleseeker who started his professional life building ISPs, when the only interview questions were: "Do you know what a Web-Browser is?", and "Do you think you can get NCSA httpd to compile on AIX?".

After scaling an ISP from a few thousand users to millions, Red wrote award winning network discovery software and promptly had his IP stolen by a company with more Lawyers than developers.

Red now works in Information Security doing "AllTheThings"™, and spends his spare time playing with family, designing electronic badges for Security Conferences, exploring languages (both human and computer), and trying to squeeze every single cycle of performance out of his systems.

Intermediate // Fast, Concurrent, Secure, Correct Actors… and a pony!

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ ponylang ]

Concrurenyc is hard.

Allowing multiple threads or Actors to access the same resources at the same time results in race conditions, non-deterministic behaviour, and inevitable data corruption.

Different systems mitigate these risks in different ways.

Databases use locks to limit access by time.

The BEAM copies messages to limit access in space.

Python has the Global Interpreter Lock to serialize all access.

Introducing Pony: An open-source, cross-platform, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language… and a pony.

Pony was originally designed to sniff market trades off a network and make very fast decisions based on what it saw. It had to be ridiculously fast, and above all - correct.

Processors aren't getting faster, they're getting wider. Pony was designed from the ground up to implement fast and safe data sharing between actors.

All variables in pony are strongly typed, and tagged with a "reference capability" which describes how that data may (or may not) be shared.

These compile-time only "reference capabilities" implement a mathematically proved model for safe data concurrency. Quickly.

To mitigate the dangers of supply-chain attacks, Pony implements "object capabilities", which are extensible unforgeable tokens which permit external operations such as file, environment, shell, or network access.

You can confidently download a hypothetical "left-pad" package. If you do not provide a token to the package, the package cannot do evil things™.

Pony has no locks.

Pony has no blocks.

Pony is memory-safe.

Pony is type-safe.

Pony has no runtime exceptions.

A program that compiles should never crash. If it crashes for anything other than memory exhaustion, it is likely a compiler or runtime bug that should be reported.

Ruthie Ballenger |> Greenville, SC

Full Stack Architect

Social: [ LinkedIn ]

Ruthie is a Greenville born native who currently works for Michelin as a Platform Architect for the Customer Experience domain with over 29 years of experience in Software Development with wide range of knowledge in many programming languages and frameworks.

Intermediate // Using an Anti Corruption Layer to Migrate Legacy Data

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ Java ]

Framework/Platform: [ Springboot, Microservices ]

To modernize applications without migrating outdated database schemas or unused data, it is essential to adopt a strategic approach to this migration. At Michelin IT, my team undertook the task of modernizing our application while simultaneously optimizing the database schema to eliminate redundant data and outdated schemas.

Our goal was to ensure continuous system operation while incrementally enhancing our web application, feature by feature. We aimed to transition our database from MySQL 5.6 to a PostgreSQL PaaS instance to leverage improved availability and advanced features.

Since we needed to keep the legacy application running and keep the data in sync with the new modern functionality however we needed to use the modernized data in the legacy application and modern application. We adopted the strategy of using an Anti Corruption Layer to keep the data in sync.

We gained significant insights into this strategy, including valuable lessons on what to avoid. This presentation outlines our approach to creating and utilizing an Anti-Corruption Layer (ACL), along with the lessons learned. It also includes Java code examples for reference.

Houston Haynes |> Asheville, NC

Founder of SpeakEZ.ai - former F# Software Foundation Board of Trustees

Social: [ LinkedIn, SpeakEZ.ai ]

Houston's career started when his university research advisor Bob Moog was leaving academia and restarting his business. That eventually led to the revival of Moog Music as an international brand. He has since worked in industries ranging from entertainment to automotive, where hardware-driven process automation, software-based decision support and related intelligent devices were always part of the picture. He founded SpeakEZ in 2020 in response to the corporate surveillance proliferating in cloud services and continues his work designing security and privacy-minded intelligent services for organizations of all sizes.

Intermediate // Firefly - an F# compiler goes native to CPU, GPU and beyond

Category: [ Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning]

Languages: [ F#, LLVM, MLIR, F* (F-star) ]

Framework/Platform: [ Native ]

This talk is an exploration of how F#s new Firefly compiler, part of the Fidelity Framework, creates a seamless bridge between high-performance computing and formal verification. Discover how Firefly's direct MLIR/LLVM compilation unlocks native efficiency while F* verification ensures mathematical correctness. Get a glimpse into how this groundbreaking open core initiative enables targeting verifiable AI systems to CPU, GPU and other accelerators "on the metal" - all while maintaining F#'s tooling vaunted reputation for providing guardrails to support developer productivity.

Blake Coleman |> Greenville, SC

Co-Founder @ STEM Search Group

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, STEM Search Group, Sessionize ]

Meet Blake—a seasoned technical recruiter since 2005 and co-founder of STEM Search Group, which he helped launch in 2020. Over the years, he's built a versatile career working with VC-backed startups, tech giants, Fortune 500 companies, and bootstrapped SaaS shops across various industries.

A graduate of the University of Georgia, Blake's journey has taken him through six different states before settling in Greenville, SC. Beyond his recruiting work, he enjoys geeking out developing his company’s proprietary AI tools. He also serves on the board of IT-oLogy, a South Carolina-based tech outreach nonprofit.

Intermediate // How AI is Reshaping Hiring, Job Searching, and Your Career

Category: [ Career ]

Why does it seem like there are 100+ applicants for every job? Why do I not hear back about a role I'm a perfect fit for?

AI and automation have shifted the landscape faster than talent acquisition teams, and recruiters have been able to adapt. Both the job seeker and those hiring are feeling the strain.

We'll discuss:

• Tools candidates should be aware of and how to use them

• Share what hiring companies see

• What's changing to combat automated applications

• What job seekers can do to get noticed

Sarah Matta |> Augusta, GA

Thinking beyond the obvious, solving beyond the expected

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Sessionize ]

Sarah has a gift for spotting what most people miss. Whether it's a gap in a process, an unspoken tension in a team, or a hidden opportunity, she has a way of bringing the invisible into the light - and helping others see it clearly, too.

Doing the right thing isn’t just a principle for Sarah; it’s a practice. She brings a strong sense of integrity to everything she does, and she doesn’t shy away from tough decisions when they’re the right ones.

With a solid background in software development, plus real-world skills in project and organizational management, Sarah knows how to get things done without losing sight of the people behind the work. She’s equally comfortable diving into code or untangling a team’s workflow - and she brings her full self to both.

She also gives her time generously, volunteering to support causes and communities she cares about. Thoughtful, reliable, and just the right amount of curious, Sarah brings clarity, heart, and momentum wherever she goes.

Keynote // Number Sense for Programmers: The Hidden Math You Already Use

Category: [ Development, Cybersecurity, Computer Science ]

Languages: [ Rust, Python, C#, JavaScript ]

Many developers claim they’re "bad at math," yet mathematical thinking is embedded in everything they do. From loops mirroring sigma notation to optimizing search algorithms through factorization, number sense - the intuitive grasp of patterns, estimation, and numerical relationships - shapes how we perform our jobs. From how we approach a challenge, think through an issue, or write efficient code.

Math in programming goes even deeper than that. Can computers generate true randomness, or is it all just clever illusion? Why does 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3, and how did floating-point errors lead to multimillion-dollar failures? In this talk, we’ll explore how embracing number sense helps developers troubleshoot bugs, write more scalable code, and unlock a deeper understanding of computation. Math isn’t just for theory, it’s a secret weapon every programmer can wield.

Doug Cone |> Greenville, SC

Professional Problem Solver

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog ]

Doug Cone is a Senior Full Stack Developer with over 2 decades of experience in software development. As the former Director of Tech & Game Design at BlueBird Gaming, Doug led a team developing and maintaining one of Australia's most popular FiveM servers, engaging thousands of gamers. His expertise spans game feature design, infrastructure management, security, and custom interface development using React/Vue. Beyond gaming, Doug has held leadership roles at Flywheel Technologies and MindSize, bringing technical vision to startups and established businesses alike. When not coding, he's an active disaster relief volunteer who has assisted at 25+ natural disaster sites and led volunteer teams for over 8 years.

Intermediate // Beyond Play: Modding Games for Real-World Tech Skills

Category: [ Development, Gaming, Security, UI/UX, Accessibility, Testing / QA, Career ]

Odds are you’re a gamer. You might not see yourself that way, but whether it’s the Black Ops, the Sims, Candy Crush, or Wordle, 3+ billion of us play video games. Gamers are no strangers to the thrill of exploring new worlds and conquering challenges, or just having fun. Game modding might seem out of reach, but it’s surprisingly accessible. In this session, I’ll share my own journey from casual gamer, to six figure income as a game modder.

Discover How Modding Can:

• Boost your problem-solving skills

• Improve your coding abilities through hands-on experience

• Provide an outlet for creativity

• Create opportunities in game development, cybersecurity, or other fields

From GameShark to full-stack development, learn how the modder’s hacker mindset translates to professional problem-solving skills

Karl Groves |> Washington, D.C.

Focused on actively fixing accessibility

Social: [ LinkedIn, Mastodon, Blog, AFixt, Sessionize ]

With 20 years of experience in web development, usability, and accessibility, Karl Groves is widely regarded as a pragmatic solution-finder and thought leader in the accessibility industry. In his role as Founder of AFixt, Karl focuses on pragmatic and efficient ways of improving the accessibility of websites and software.

Intermediate // Everything you need to know about JavaScript accessibility

Category: [ UI/UX, Accessibility ]

Languages: [ HTML/CSS, Javascript ]

Accessibility is often seen as nebulous by designers and developers. It is particularly difficult if you don't know anyone with disabilities or have never watched anyone with disabilities use a computer. In this talk, Karl Groves uses a live coding example to walk through the high level requirements for an accessible user experience that relies on JavaScript. In the process, we'll talk about focus management, accessibility, and the proper implementation of WAI-ARIA to ensure the broadest compatibility with browsers and assistive technologies.

James Lowden |> Camden, ME

Senior Architect, Symas Corporation, bringing COBOL to GCC

Social: [ LinkedIn, COBOLworx, Sessionize ]

James spent the first 30 years of his career on Wall Street in application programming, database design, and quantitative research. Now he's in pure technology, building compilers and systems for other programmers. After decades in Manhattan, his work life is now fully virtual, and his real life is on the Maine seacoast.

Intermediate // The Once and Future COBOL

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ COBOL ]

GCC 15, due for release in May 2025, for the first time includes COBOL among the languages it compiles. Alongside the venerable gcc and g++, there is now gcobol.

The reader may well wonder why a small company would devote years of development to produce a product they don't own and can't sell. The reader might also wonder why GCC decided to include COBOL, and why anyone not retired would care. In short, what use is COBOL?

To those questions and more, we have answers.

As Mark Twain said of himself, news of COBOL's demise is much exaggerated. Industry studies show billions of lines of COBOL still in production. With a probability of 95%, your last ATM transaction went through a COBOL application. Nearly every large firm went through Y2K 25 years ago to add two digits to the date, to adapt their critical software to the 21st century. They didn't do that to throw it all away.

COBOL was and remains useful because it was specifically designed for its problem domain. No language is better suited for nuts-and-bolts unglamorous data processing. For example, COBOL defines an I/O model, numerical precision, 8 forms of rounding, and over 100 runtime exceptions.

Programming languages often have shallow, undeserved reputations. Lisp has too many parentheses, COBOL too many words, Perl is write-only. Let's talk about why COBOL remains viable and vital, and why it's now part of GCC.

Nerando Johnson |> Atlanta, GA

Software Developer | Technology Consultant | Technology Community Organizer

Social: [ @nerajno, LinkedIn, Instagram, Blog, Sessionize ]

Meetup: [ FreeCodeCamp Atlanta ]

Full-stack developer skilled in React/Node.js, led mortgage platform development with 9-person team, building scalable solutions for 5,000 concurrent users. Created JavaScript ad tech at Cartoon Network (Emmy winner 2019) and rebuilt in-house software at Equity Prime Mortgage. Strong in problem-solving, documentation, and QA. Actively mentors new developers through Thinkful and Lighthouse, co-organizes FreeCodeCamp Atlanta. Won $40,000 ATLC3 civic hacking competition, donated to tech education charities.

Lightning // And It Was Written ~ An Introspective in the Importance of ReadMes

Category: [ Development, Career, Ecosystem ]

Languages: [ Typescript, JavaScript, Ruby, Other ]

Situation: You build this awesome project, providing the answers to the universe.... but no one can use it as you have no documentation.

Problem: In the world of open-source tooling, a lot of tools are built without any documentation on how to use them.

Why Talk About This: As the software ecosystem becomes more dependent on open-sourced development, it becomes a greater need to have better and clearly documented software. This talk aims to share tips to enhance documentation, and templates to make the process easier and why this is one of the important habits to develop as a developer/ software craftsman.

Why listen to me: As a former science educator turned full-stack developer, I have gained some insights into the importance of proper documentation and its effectiveness as a communication tool./skill.

Matt "Kelly" Williams |> Loveland, CO

Sustainable IT Innovator Championing Agile Sustainability & Green Tech | | CEO of Sustainable IT Manifesto Foundation | International Speaker | Advisory Board Member

Social: [ @matt_k_williams, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Blog, Making Software Greener, Sustainable IT Manifesto ]

Matt "Kelly" Williams is the founder of Making Software Greener, the CEO of the Sustainable IT Manifesto Foundation, advisory board member for the Green Computing Foundation, and a speaker and mentor on IT practices including DevOps, Cloud Computing, and mental health advocacy. He has always wanted to be a Renaissance person; perhaps one day he will be. In the meantime, he explores IT Sustainability, is learning photography, designs tabletop games, reads, weaves, cooks, hacks, and explores the mountains near Loveland, Colorado.

Keynote // Putting the FUN back in Fundamentals: Data Structures, Algorithms, and More!

Category: [ Computer Science, Development, Career ]

In this session, we will bring FUN back to Fundamentals as we:

• Look at favorite data structures and algorithms from the 70s, 80s, and 90s: where are they today?

• Discover why hashes aren't just for breakfast.

• Discover the Lolrus' favorite data structure (hint: it's got a bukkit).

• Discover why some searches gallop and others proceed at a snail's pace.

• Face hard truths: sometimes brute force is the best method.

• Face harder truths: someone has to maintain the code you write today... and they know where you live.

• Face the hardest truth: CPU, Memory, Storage, and I/O are not infinite.

And... most importantly... discover the BEST algorithm and the BEST data structure.

Joel Taddei |> Greenville, SC

Sr. Backend Engineer - Zapier

Social: [ LinkedIn, Zapier ]

Hi! I'm Joel. I've lived in upstate South Carolina for the past 10 years, originally moving here to teach at The Iron Yard. I've been coding for about 15 years, though I also have a background in Architecture and Design from my previous career.

I am currently employed at Zapier where I spend all day working on the Tables product and obsessing over process automation. When I feel like coding in my free time, I am currently working on a web based Bingo platform.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Joel is also the Founder of the Carolina Code Conference!

Intermediate // Lark and Load: Parsing with Python

Category: [ Development ]

Languages: [ Python ]

Framework/Platform: [ Lark ]

Parsing structured text isn’t just about JSON or XML—sometimes, you may need to work with unconventional formats, legacy data, or -in the extreme case- create your own pet-language. This talk explores how Lark, a powerful Python parsing library, can help you handle complex text processing challenges with ease.

We’ll discuss how to use Lark to parse uncommon data formats, transforming raw text into structured data. Beyond that, we’ll dive into building your own domain-specific language (DSL), such as a custom formula language or query syntax, empowering users to interact with your application in more expressive ways.

If you've ever wondered about parsing custom text inputs or dreamed of crafting your own lightweight language, this talk will give you the roadmap to make it happen—without getting lost in compiler theory.

Ethan Foulkes |> Greenville, SC

Simplifying work.

Social: [ LinkedIn, Magic Button Labs ]

Ethan is the CEO of Magic Button Labs. His passion for simplifying explanations for how dev, design, and product management interact has led to the creation of Klutch as a bridge between the business and technical worlds. The Klutch framework uses fun, real-life stories to teach the first principles of outcome driven development using plain English.

Intermediate // 10 words for building software successfully.

Category: [ Development, Team Process & Management ]

Software development success doesn't come from how well you build the things you need.

Success comes from knowing what NOT to do, and making sure no one does those things!

Sounds simple, but it's actually incredible hard to do.

You need expertise from designers, product managers, and developers. Each of these teams is full of frameworks, experts and industry jargon.

More importantly, this expertise needs to be aligned with executives, salespeople and marketers.

Alignment is hard when you speak different languages, and if you aren't fluent in someone else's language...it's easy to talk past each other and not even realize it.

After decades of working in this world, we've landed on 10 words that explain the 3 first principles everyone in a company needs to understand for true alignment to happen.

Come check out the 3 animated short stories that will give everyone in your company a common language to understand and combat the most common anti-patterns that take teams off course.

David Mackey |> Augusta, GA

Software Engineer / Owner, Eccentric Quality Solutions LLC

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Eccentric Quality Solutions, Sessionize ]

David Mackey is the founder of Eccentric Quality Solutions, a custom software development company. Dave has experience working with a number of industries over 25+ years including healthcare, higher education, non-profits, legal, social networks, and construction. He currently works primarily with Python and TypeScript but also has experience in PHP, C#/VB .NET, and vanilla JavaScript. HTML is his good friend while CSS is something he works with - but isn't happy about it.

Intermediate // Retro Coding with QB64

Category: [ Development, Gaming ]

Languages: [ QuickBasic, QB64 ]

Do you miss the "good old days" of DOS and QuickBasic? Perhaps you've only heard of these ancient technologies. They are still around - here and there. One niche community keeping QuickBasic code going is QB64. It can compile to Windows, Linux, and macOS. In this talk Dave will give you a quick introduction to QB64 and why you might want to give it a spin.

Sam Ruby |> Raleigh, NC

Rails Specialist, fly.io

Social: [ @samruby, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Blog, fly.io ]

Books: [ Agile Web Development with Rails ]

Rails Specialist, fly.io; Author of Agile Web Development with Rails; previously ASF president, W3C HTML WG co-chair; IETF Atom WG secretary; Convener of the C# and .Net CLI WGs in ECMA; PHP Core Group.

Intermediate // Using Kamal 2.0 in Production

Category: [ Operations ]

Languages: [ Javascript, Ruby ]

Framework/Platform: [ Ruby on Rails, Sqlite3, PostgreSQL, Bun ]

Kamal is a tool that offers zero-downtime deploys, rolling restarts, asset bridging, remote builds, accessory service management, and everything else you need to deploy and manage your web app in production with Docker.

Kamal 2.0 was released in September of 2024, and replaced Traefik with a new proxy, enabling automatic HTTPS, and multiple apps to be deployed to a single server.

Rails 8.0 was released in November of 2024, and pre-configures Kamal 2.0 for new applications.

In this talk I want to draw a distinction between using Kamal for deployment (getting your app on a server and starting it there), and using Kamal as a part of a larger effort to put your app in production - with things like automatic backups, logging dashboards, and monitoring.

This will venture into topics that aren't covered by the existing website, "Missing Manual" handbook, or videos which understandably focus only on Kamal itself.

I'll also cover when to chose a PaaS, when to chose Kamal, and how you can even run them side by side, something I do myself.

Kevin Ferretti |> Asheville, NC

Technical Development Lead, also other things

Social: [ LinkedIn ]

Meetup: [ Asheville Coders League ]

Kevin went to college for biomedical engineering and quickly figured out that the only fun part of it was the software stuff, so he ditched the blood and guts and dove head first into the tech industry. Any chance he gets to deep dive into a new technology and share that knowledge with like minded people is a blessing.

Software is cool but can be a lot sometimes, so to balance things out Kevin does some birding, photography, and dancing.

Intermediate // Reading the Minds We Create

Category: [ Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Computer Science ]

The AI train is moving in one direction: forward. Depending on who you are, this might excite you or frighten you. You might believe that under the hood it's harmlessly executing instructions, or you might fear it has latent potential for world destruction. Regardless of where you stand, you're both right and wrong - because at this moment, *no one truly knows* precisely what's happening inside these massive models.

But we're entering an exciting era. Recently, significant progress has been made in mechanistic interpretability - the technical term for peeking inside AI’s "black box." We're discovering that we *can* understand more about an AI model's thought processes than we ever believed possible.

This is crucial, because while we can't slow down the AI train, we can catch up to it. If we can observe its thinking, we can identify problematic patterns before they cause actual harm - and even directly modify them.

Louis Burroughs |> Greenville, SC

Chief Architect, Business Solutions, Michelin North America

Social: [ LinkedIn, Sessionize ]

Versatile leader with a knack for tackling tough challenges in fast-paced environments. I'm a Software Architect who loves designing and building enterprise apps. I pick up new tech quickly, enjoy digging into research and writing, and have a knack for finding

creative solutions and boosting team productivity with a blend of tech smarts and people skills. I am passionate about building high-performing teams and know my way around Lean and Agile.  I recently achieved my Black Belt in Thinking, which utilizes the Thinking Processes from the Theory of Constraints.

Lightning // Throughput in Software Development

Category: [ Development, Team Process & Management ]

Languages: [ Java ]

I created the game Throughput to demonstrate how Queuing Theory and the Theory of Constraints can improve software development flow. The talk involves showing the gameplay in the background while I describe the game and the lessons within (including several common pitfalls most teams fall into). In the game, everyone plays on the same team to maximize the flow of materials through a software development process. Specific randomized events impact performance and choices the team can make to improve their results.

Diana Pham |> Denver, CO

Developer Advocate at Vonage and Appwrite Hero

Social: [ @dianasoyster, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Blog, Vonage Developer Center, Sessionize ]

Food & Lifestyle Socials: [ TikTok, YouTube, Instagram ]

With a high spirit and a low sense of mortality, Diana completed her master’s in CS regardless of never having coded prior to grad school. Through her passion for learning and teaching tech, she found her calling in advocacy, where she exercises her creativity through conference talks and content creation. She likes oysters.

Intermediate // Beyond Badges: The Biology & Psychology Behind Effective Gamification in Mobile Apps

Category: [ Other ]

Let’s level up our knowledge about mobile application development from a scientific perspective–more specifically, gamification! In this talk, you will gain insight into motivation theories, understand the impact of gamification on brain activity, and acquire actionable techniques to enhance your mobile apps through effective gamification. By examining case studies related to this topic, we will discover real-world examples of successful implementations and a gaming company use case of Network APIs.

Sagar Suri |> Charleston, SC

Director, Data Foundations @ Rapid7

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Rapid7 ]

Sagar has 14 years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, AI/ML, business intelligence and data governance across various industries including cybersecurity, e-commerce, commercial real estate and investment banking. Currently, Sagar is the Director of Data Foundations at cybersecurity firm, Rapid7.

Lightning // Current Events: Lessons Learned Streaming 14 Trillion Daily Telemetry Events

Category: [ Cybersecurity, Operations, DevOps ]

Languages: [ Python, SQL ]

Framework/Platform: [ Kafka, Kubernetes, TimescaleDB, Snowflake, AWS, InfluxDB ]

In this talk, we'll discuss experiences leveraging technologies such as Kafka, Kubernetes, TimescaleDB, Snowflake, AWS, InfluxDB and more to stream over fourteen trillion telemetry events daily in the cybersecurity space. There were ups. There were downs. Join me for the entire roller coaster ride as I do my best to ensure you don't repeat the same mistakes. If all goes well, you'll leave armed with some helpful tips and if nothing else, some re-assurance that we are all forever learning. And that's ok.

Zach Daniel |> Greensboro, NC

Principal Platform Engineer at Alembic, Board Member at Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, Creator of Ash Framework

Social: [ @ZachSDaniel1, LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Mastodon, Blog, Ash Framework, Sessionize ]

Zach is a software engineer with ten years of experience with production Elixir applications. He is the creator of Ash Framework, a resource-oriented declarative design framework for Elixir, and principal platform engineer at Alembic. He has a passion for declarative design, functional programming, and contributing to the open source community. When not programming, he enjoys spending time with his wonderful wife, pets, friends and family.

Intermediate // Building on Bedrock: Elixir's Fundamental Design Advantage

Category: [ Development, Ecosystem ]

Languages: [ Elixir, Erlang ]

I've been writing Elixir for over 10 years, and have consistently seen teams deliver software to a higher degree of quality, at a higher rate of speed, and at significantly lower cost to build and to operate than with any other toolchain. Elixir is still a "niche" language, and lacks the centralized corporate backing that many other ecosystems have. Without the same community mass and financial backing, how is it possible for Elixir to be so productive and effective?

As a framework author, I often deal with high level abstractions and business logic. In this talk, however, we will peel back the covers to illustrate the small design choices underpinning the Elixir programming language that manifest in exponentially more efficient and understandable applications. Together, we will see how the core design choices in any system are multiplied and magnified when we build on top of them.

Most importantly, we will come to understand the fundamental reason that Elixir manages to be so productive and effective: We aren't building on sand.

Jake Hendley |> Greenville, SC

Senior Director of Engineering @ Ford Pro

Social: [ LinkedIn, Blog, Ford Pro ]

A bit about me - I'm a Greenville native and spent years working out of Openworks and arranging as many happy hours as possible. Over the last 4 years, I've gone from the first US engineering hire at a small startup in the bay area to leading an engineering org at Ford Motor Company. That small bay area startup was acquired by Ford in 2021, and we've been building cool stuff ever since.

Intermediate // Software in the EV space

Category: [ Development, Operations, DevOps ]

Languages: [ Go, Python, JavaScript ]

Framework/Platform: [ Nestjs, Kafka, Kubernetes ]

Software in the EV space is a super wide topic. There's OCPP, which allows us to control chargers. OCPI, which allows us to publish available public chargers on various networks. ISO-15118, which gets more nitty-gritty and allows us to receive data from both chargers and vehicles. And a ton more - it's a world of acronyms and standards and protocols, but at the end of the day, we have node apps in kubernetes clusters controlling distributed physical hardware (the chargers).

We're solving some interesting problems - EV charger comms go over cell networks, so there's connectivity problems built right in. Chargers hold onto data while offline, but that amount of data varies and runtime decisions have to be made when a charger comes back online. I could probably talk for days about the whole problem space, but a high-level primer may make more sense for this talk.

My teams specifically build software that manage the flow of energy to electric vehicles. We have fleets of thousands of chargers across the globe, which we maintain direct websocket connections to and control via a protocol called OCPP. Last year, we also launched the first OEM public charging network (Ford Charge Network), which allows the general public to charge their EVs at various locations across the US and Canada. There are a ton of other features we've built - power company integrations to help charge cheaply, complex authorization logic to determine whether a vehicle should be able to charge at a specific charger, EV route planning to ensure the vehicle receives enough energy before departure, provisioning systems for tracking the physical charger's lifecycle from manufacturing to installation to eventual decommissioning. Faults and error states, ton of reporting (built on kafka with the event-sourcing paradigm).

I'm excited to talk about the EV charging ecosystem and the role software plays in that - chargers talk to vehicles, chargers and vehicles talk to our central systems, our systems talk to utilities, payment providers, public charging networks, etc. and all this is enabled by software.

Duncan Michel |> Greenville, SC

Trinity Cyber - Senior Detection Engineer

Social: [ LinkedIn, Trinity Cyber ]

Meetup: [ DEF CON 864 ]

Duncan is a cybersecurity professional and former Army officer with over thirteen years of experience in military operations, intelligence gathering, threat modeling, detection engineering, and security research.

Keynote // Regex for Fun and Profit

Category: [ Cybersecurity, Development ]

Languages: [ Python, Bash/Shell, All ]

Framework/Platform: [ Linux CLI, grep, YARA ]

A primer on regular expressions, highlighting the specific applications of this skill for cybersecurity analysis. This presentation reviews the background, basic syntax, pitfalls, development tools and cybersecurity applications of regular expressions. Example syntax is based on the Perl-compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) flavor. This talk also contains a discussion of Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDoS) - both how this vulnerability is introduced and how to test for it. Practical applications demonstrated include searching through logs, utilizing the regex functionality in YARA to detect malware files, and including pattern matching in Python scripts.

It’s going to be a great year!