Announcing the next Carolina Code Conference - August 23rd & 24th, 2024!
Thank you Flywheel and what's next for 2024?
If you attended the 2023 Carolina Code Conference, you already heard this news during our closing announcements. We talked about our plans for the future, the format, gave the big reveal on our exciting venue and dates for next year thanks to our Platinum sponsor, Flywheel!
If you didn’t attend, now you can watch the announcements yourself thanks to our fantastic video team.
What’s next for 2024?
Greenville, SC is a special place in a lot of ways. One of the most obvious after seeing this conference come together is the community that made it happen. There is simply no way that this event comes together as well as it did without the efforts of a lot of volunteers behind the scenes who wanted it to succeed.
We want to expand that reach by bringing more of the quad state region to Greenville. Greenville, SC is in the upper west corner of South Carolina. Within a 3 hour driving distance we have access to Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville and Charleston. Expand the radius a little farther and we’re in a position to connect Birmingham, AL to the Research Triangle of Raleigh, NC.
Growing Together
We’re going to take a step toward that growth by doubling in size to a capacity of 300 attendees. We’re also going to expand to a 2 day event across Friday and Saturday, August 23rd and 24th, 2024!
Demand was high this year despite the limited number of tickets that were available. The 2023 event had only 150 spots due to the facility capacity. Despite the very small time window for the event to come together, tickets sold out in only 25 minutes and we ended up with a waiting list of another hundred.
We want to grow by building upon the energy that got us here and that means keeping you with us, so all attendees from the 2023 event will receive early access to tickets for the 2024 event. This will be our policy moving forward as well. If you attend one year, you will be able to skip the ticket line to attend the following year.
And don’t worry if you returned your ticket so that somebody on the waiting list could attend! You did a good thing by returning that ticket and you’re going to get early access too.
Share those photos too!
Here’s the full feed of photos from the conference this year, thanks to True Light Photography of Florence, SC. Feel free to share any of them you like on your socials and tag your friends too. Just please tag us when you do it!
Growth Challenges
After organizing the conference this year, one thing became very clear: there are very real costs associated per attendee per day at an event like this. Our sponsors came through in 2023 to cover all of those costs for us but long term, the conference would be taking a huge risk to depend entirely on new sponsors every year. You never know if an economic pullback will tighten marketing budgets and take the conference down with it.
In an effort to plan for that long term success, we will start charging for tickets during the 2024 event. Our goal will be to keep the cost of tickets low to primarily cover the attendee related expenses (food, drinks, swag, taxes, etc) and we’re working on a way for people to apply for “ticket scholarships” as well as a way to allow businesses and individuals to fund them.
Our early access 2023 attendees will also receive a 20% discount on those tickets. Volunteers and Speakers will continue to receive free tickets as well.
Sponsors
We’re currently working on our sponsorship prospectus for 2024 and will share it here as soon as we have more information available. You can also reach out at any time to sponsor@carolina.codes to setup a time to discuss opportunities for 2024.
Speakers
Our speakers were fantastic this year and we’re excited to continue the single track format. The pacing of variable talk times throughout the day received a lot of positive feedback from everyone involved and it is a format that will also be maintained moving forward.
As a speaker at the Carolina Code Conference, you will have the attention of all in attendance without having to worry about winning your time slot. You can also count on professional recording to share your talk with the world thanks to our videography team.
It’s a polyglot conference after all, so bring us all of the weird and interesting talks that you can! Speakers will, of course, be provided free tickets to the event.
Volunteers
There will be plenty of volunteer opportunities for the 2024 event starting…right now actually. If you want to be a part of any of these, come join us on the HackGreenville Slack in the #carolinacodeconference channel to be part of the conversation and find out more. We will definitely have free tickets available for our volunteers as well.
The 2024 Code Header Challenge
Beginning soon, we’re going to need all of the polyglot header graphics we can get for our social accounts with the 2024 information. I’m still just as bad with graphics as I was in 2023, so keep on finding creative ways share the conference info in your favorite language, database, data structure, 3d animation or whatever else you can come up with to get the word out.
The Code Header Challenge has a solid chance to become an annual Carolina Code Conference tradition.
Building the strangest conference website ever made
We’re going to build a website that is a weird, “because we can” showpiece to become the long term home of this event. We need to showcase information, speakers, sponsors, former speakers and more while including the most ridiculous fun technology stack ever conceived.
We’re going to built a polyglot website for a polyglot conference. If you want to help, we’d love to have you. If you want your tech stack to be a part of the showpiece and you’re thinking of sponsoring the conference, reach out and let us know.
Connect with tech meetups in the Quad state area
There are a lot of tech meetups across the quad state (SC, NC, TN, GA) area and each of those groups are an ideal audience to talk about the Carolina Code Conference in 2024 to get the word out.
If you know of a meetup and would like us to put something together to share with them, to physically or virtually attend or any combination of those it’s a great way to get involved. It takes a lot of people to spread the word, but if we had 10 people that were willing to talk to 1 meetup a month for a few minutes that’s 120 meetups.
If you just want to help us find meetups in the first place, that would be welcome too. Every area might not have a central meetup list.
Additional volunteer opportunities
It takes a village to pull all of this together and we’re certainly not limited in our volunteer opportunities. Volunteers are needed to help us connect with potential sponsors for 2024, come up with creative swag ideas, help on the day of the event, figure out entertaining activities or way to make this event even more fun.
Hosted at Crescent ONE
The Crescent ONE building is the next iteration of a facility with a lot of history of economic development here in Greenville, SC. During the mid-twentieth century we knew this building as the home of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company. During the textile boom, it was the Piedmont Shirt Factory.
Now Flywheel it hopes to drive a more modern type of economic boom by connecting startups to investors to co-working and conference space. The facility is expecting to open in the Spring of 2024 while hosting the Carolina Code Conference 2024 as its major ribbon cutting event in August!
We’re excited for the opportunity to work together. We hope to bring you construction updates throughout the year as well.