2024 Carolina Code Conference Wrap Up
Recap, Highlights and What's Next for 2025
That was one heck of a good time! There are a whole lot of people who deserve a thank you for making the event such a success.
Thank You Sponsors!
First off, we have to thank all of Our Wonderful Sponsors for 2024 because without your continued support this event could not happen. We also need to give a very special thank you to our Platinum Sponsors: Flywheel and Fly.io.
For the folks at Flywheel, the venue was absolutely incredible! Beautifully constructed, functionally designed and everything was configurable to fit the needs of our conference crowd. The office and co-working space looks amazing and we are very excited for the future!
To the team at Fly.io, you brought two excellent speakers, great swag, a cool platform demo, a thoughful team and threw an incredible Happy Hour for our attendees Friday night over at New Realm Brewing that really put a chef’s kiss on Day 1. If that wasn’t enough, you’re also going to be hosting our somewhat loony Polyglot Site for a Polyglot Conference on your innovative platform as soon as we get up and running!
Thank you both!
Thank You Volunteer Team!
Thank you to our awesome Volunteer Team and the staff at Flywheel who made sure everything went off without a hitch. Check-in, food (so much food), sponsor assistance, speaker aid and dealing with all of the things that inevitably come up during the day you made sure the ship stayed on course so we could all enjoy the ride. Thank you!
Robert Roskam and Chandler Roth, thank you both for helping to MC the event and consistently lay down the tech dad jokes to help maintain the standard of facepalms, eye rolls and groans from our attendees.
Thank You Speakers!
Thank you to all of Our 30 Incredible Speakers on a single track who just rocked it! Whether it was inspiration, security threats, cool languages (old and new), platforms, best practices, mapping interfaces, lambda calculus, violations of the no politics rule by claiming mangoes are the superior fruit, or even learning the importance of daily showers for “the algorithms” you absolutely nailed it every time. You gave us 2 days full of curiosity and laughter.
Can’t wait to share the videos of your talks in a 2-3 weeks on YouTube!
We’ll also be putting out a ton of content on X, LinkedIn and Instagram too so follow us to stay in the loop!
Thank You 2024 Attendees!
The reason this conference works is because you make it work. You show up, learn, make friends, help out, share, laugh, explore and contribute. I have personally heard from so many people about how “nice” and “cool” everybody was; how excited they are to have gotten a chance to be a part of this community and how much they are looking forward to coming back next year because of it!
Thank you to Our Media Team
Phillip Guyton’s True Light Photography [ Instagram, Facebook ] is responsible for all of the event photos, the day 1 highlight video above and even some incredible drone photography. He posted the final set of all images from the conference on Smug Mug and we are linking them here for you. We’ll be posting a lot of them on social media over the next few weeks, but feel free to browse and share your own as well! Just please tag us when you do!
The team from Aaron Pate Media are currently editing about 39 hours worth of footage from their camera men, HDMI captures and audio captures from the 13 hours of conference presentations so that we can publish these talks with all the polish they deserve. We can’t wait to see the results after the great work from 2023.
DEF CON 864 Capture the Flag
Our 2nd annual Capture the Flag, by the crew over at DEF CON 864, returned for a rousing competition. For both the seasoned participants and complete newcomers, there was something for everyone.
People learned to pick a lock, hack a server, get information out of people through social engineering…like finding out who is the greatest college football team of all time…
The competition was close but Eric Gosnell ended up winning the competition with 244 points over our 2nd place finisher with 243 points! Both won free tickets to the 2025 conference, but Eric also won a complete Raspberry Pi 5 kit!
Conference Chat with Zulip
This year we made the Zulip invites a few days in advance rather than the day before the conference like 2023. It paid big dividends as our attendees were using it to ask questions, share information, plan their trip, participate in the CTF, find people with similar interests, share photos and even thank our sponsors!
The Carolina Code Cast will slow down this year
Starting the podcast this year has been a real educational experience all around. We had some fantastic conversations and published 27 episodes so far, with several more in the backlog waiting to be published. The production schedule was a little tougher to keep up with than expected, so we’re planning to slow down on those episodes considerably this year.
You’re an All Star!
This year we tried something a little different with our Lyrical Code Challenge song selection. Rather than doing the voting for the next year’s song in the middle of the year, we did it all in one day so that our 2024 attendees could narrow down the brackets before selecting a the song for the 2025 Lyrical Code T-Shirt!
The winner for 2025 is All Star by Smash Mouth! [ YouTube, Lyrics ]
Get a head start on the challenge now by starting pull requests in your favorite languages on our Github repo. Maybe even some languages that you learned about this year…? Remember, the most creative entry wins a free ticket!
Didn’t get one of our Bohemian Rhapsody Lyrical Code T-shirts for 2024? It’s not to late! Place an order by September 8th and our friends at The Graphic Cow will ship it directly to you!
Advent of Carolina Code for 2025
We’ll also be doing a private leaderboard for Advent of Code again this December! We started this last year and hope to see y’all continue to use it to learn this year while you get a chance to win some 2025 tickets in the process. There are a lot of ways to win and we’ll have more details as we get closer to December. Memes may be involved.
We’ll See You Next Year!
This has been an amazing year and we can’t wait to see everybody again soon! The 2025 Carolina Code Conference, will return to Flywheel on August 15th and 16th next year! Hope to see you there!
Appreciate all the work you, the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, put into the conference! I'm really glad I was able to attend and look forward to coming again next year!