2025 Recap (Finally!)
We're a little behind on emails since August, prepare to catch up!
What a year! The 2025 Carolina Code Conference is in the books and the feedback has been amazing. People came from all over to attend this year’s event; Colorado, Maine, even the far away and mysterious land of Canada!
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 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.
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…
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 for EVERYBODY, 2026 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
Build Carolina (with video!)
From Attendees
Ben Overcash (with an e-ink badge)
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!