Carolina Code Conference 2024
The Carolina Code Conference was the first developer conference I attended as well as my first time speaking at a developer conference. It was new and exciting, if a little scary. Now that I’m on the far side of it, I wanted to look back at the experience and the weeks leading up to it.
My first foray into the conference scene was submitting a talk for Carolina Code Conference 2023. At the time, I was pretty heavy into MuleSoft (for work, definitely not because I wanted to be). A coworker mentioned the conference to me and suggested that I should submit a talk for it. With MuleSoft taking the lion’s share of my current work responsibilities, I figured that low-code/no-code solutions were probably the thing I was most qualified to talk about.
Looking into the submission process, I couldn’t figure out exactly what a “good” submission would look like. The only required details were a title and description. I decided to put together what I WOULD present as a talk, record a video of it, and include a link to that video in the talk description. Was it overkill? Maybe. But I wanted to give myself the best chance at being selected.
I ended up not making the cut for the inaugural Carolina Code Conference, but the organizer of the conference Barry reached out to me to see if I would be interested in speaking on the Carolina Code Cast. I figured that it was still an opportunity to formally step into the Greenville software engineering community, so I accepted. We discussed that original idea about MuleSoft, as well as quite a few other topics in a more long-form layout. It was really cool to be actively contributing to the tech scene, but without the pressure of speaking physically in front of so many people. I was just talking shop with someone else in the field.
When the call for speakers opened up for the 2024 conference, I had to throw in my lot. Although I could’ve resubmitted my same talk about no-code/low-code solutions, that ship had sailed. We were actively trying to migrate off of MuleSoft for work, and I personally hated the platform. There was no way I was going to speak at a conference for a service that I thought was garbage.
My first submission was titled “Working Through Impostor Syndrome,” which I submitted as soon as the call for speakers opened. It’s a subject that is very important to me, both as someone who has gone through impostor syndrome myself, but also seeing other people in the industry go through the same thing and not yet know how to grapple with that. I wanted to share in a public forum just why impostor syndrome fears are so rarely based on fact and give some of my tips for how to get past that way of thinking.
After a few months of thinking on it, my second submission was “The Value of Prototypes.” Having worked with businesses enough to see a creation of mine get critiqued and reworked an annoying amount, I’m very supportive of anything that gets an example to users before we actually build the software so I can figure out what you actually need, versus what you’re asking for.
On the final day of talk submissions, I dropped a last minute entry on “The Case Against Bleeding Edge.” Call me conservative, but I don’t want to adopt some “latest and greatest” technology that’s trending in Silicon Valley. If it’s good enough to still be used in the industry after a few years, THEN maybe we should consider using it. I will not be swayed by buzzwords and flashy demos.
The afternoon of April 25, I got news that “The Value of Prototypes” was selected for the conference. I was ecstatic. Especially in the wake of that previously mentioned impostor syndrome, it was so validating to know that I was specifically selected to speak in front of an audience of my peers. I just had to make sure I didn’t bomb it.
The morning of the conference, I was super excited. My talk was right before lunch on the first day, so I got a couple of talks to acclimate and there would be plenty of conference after my talk to enjoy as a spectator. For the first three talks, I just sat and savored the experience. After the third talk, my time was getting closer and I wanted to be fully prepared and ready to go on stage. I repositioned near the setup desk and made sure my slideshow was ready to begin.
Knowing that the talks were being recorded, I told my wife that the talk would either go fine or it would be terrible. If it went particularly bad, I would live forever in infamy on YouTube. No pressure.
When my time had come, I got mic’d up and brought up my presentation as the MC introduced me. The common theme was to deliver a dad joke between talks. When my time began, I opened with my own joke. “How do you catch a unique rabbit? Unique up on it.” It fell flat, but there was nothing to be done about that. I got started with explaining the value of prototypes.
The previous lightning talks had been delivered at appropriately lightning pace. They hit the ground running and didn’t pause until they were finished. I adopted the same method and ended up a few minutes under estimate. My biggest concern was going over and throwing off the schedule, so I considered it a huge success to get in before the buzzer.
With my talk finished, I considered the weekend properly started. The rest of the talks on the first day were really interesting, especially one talk about the algorithms used by different dating sites. After the pressure of my own talk was removed, it was a cool experience to hear experts talk about their particular niches of the field.
Once the conference talks were finished, we met up at New Realm Brewing for the Happy Hour networking event. A serendipitous exchange with a waiter informed us of their “speakeasy” back room. It was convenient, because my peers and I get a little loud when we’re excited, so we didn’t have to worry about bothering the other patrons. We made small talk with speakers, exchanged business cards, and made plans to link up and discuss projects later.
The second day was much more about networking for me. I sat in for a few talks, but I wanted to make sure that I shook some hands and made some connections. My crew made a pass around the vendor tables and picked up some cool swag. We stopped at the Blue Ridge Consultants table because they had HOT SAUCE. Who has hot sauce freebies? Ended up talking to them about making mead and the SC laws around making and selling moonshine. They were cool guys.
There was also a vendor that had a contest for a Raspberry Pi 5 kit. The way they pulled you in was a set of locks and lockpicking kits at the table, but the full contest included things like trivia questions and a multi-user dungeon or MUD challenge. We tried our hands at lockpicking. I ended up getting two of them, but certainly not enough to justify spending time on the whole contest. Still, it was a neat idea.
After plenty of networking, a few more free bottle openers, and one final talk on lambda calculus and JavaScript, I was done. My social battery was depleted, my pockets were full of swag, and my brain was so bombarded with different ideas and architectures, I knew I wasn’t good for anything else. I said my farewells to the team, fist bumped a few speakers on the way out, and left Carolina Code Conference 2024 with cool souvenirs and good memories.
When professional photos were finally published, I had to see how bad mine were. In contrast to professional speakers, I realized just how animated I am. Between exaggerated shrugs and gestures that look almost like a dab, I look like a lunatic. Fortunately, it’s pretty representative of me.
I’m so thankful for the opportunity to speak at the conference and make a lot of new friends at the same time. It was really fun and I can’t wait for next year’s conference. Even if I don’t get selected to talk, I at least want to attend and link up with people there. It was a crazy experience and I can guarantee you I won’t ever forget my first tech conference.
My first foray into the conference scene was submitting a talk for Carolina Code Conference 2023. At the time, I was pretty heavy into MuleSoft (for work, definitely not because I wanted to be). A coworker mentioned the conference to me and suggested that I should submit a talk for it. With MuleSoft taking the lion’s share of my current work responsibilities, I figured that low-code/no-code solutions were probably the thing I was most qualified to talk about.
Looking into the submission process, I couldn’t figure out exactly what a “good” submission would look like. The only required details were a title and description. I decided to put together what I WOULD present as a talk, record a video of it, and include a link to that video in the talk description. Was it overkill? Maybe. But I wanted to give myself the best chance at being selected.
I ended up not making the cut for the inaugural Carolina Code Conference, but the organizer of the conference Barry reached out to me to see if I would be interested in speaking on the Carolina Code Cast. I figured that it was still an opportunity to formally step into the Greenville software engineering community, so I accepted. We discussed that original idea about MuleSoft, as well as quite a few other topics in a more long-form layout. It was really cool to be actively contributing to the tech scene, but without the pressure of speaking physically in front of so many people. I was just talking shop with someone else in the field.
When the call for speakers opened up for the 2024 conference, I had to throw in my lot. Although I could’ve resubmitted my same talk about no-code/low-code solutions, that ship had sailed. We were actively trying to migrate off of MuleSoft for work, and I personally hated the platform. There was no way I was going to speak at a conference for a service that I thought was garbage.
My first submission was titled “Working Through Impostor Syndrome,” which I submitted as soon as the call for speakers opened. It’s a subject that is very important to me, both as someone who has gone through impostor syndrome myself, but also seeing other people in the industry go through the same thing and not yet know how to grapple with that. I wanted to share in a public forum just why impostor syndrome fears are so rarely based on fact and give some of my tips for how to get past that way of thinking.
After a few months of thinking on it, my second submission was “The Value of Prototypes.” Having worked with businesses enough to see a creation of mine get critiqued and reworked an annoying amount, I’m very supportive of anything that gets an example to users before we actually build the software so I can figure out what you actually need, versus what you’re asking for.
On the final day of talk submissions, I dropped a last minute entry on “The Case Against Bleeding Edge.” Call me conservative, but I don’t want to adopt some “latest and greatest” technology that’s trending in Silicon Valley. If it’s good enough to still be used in the industry after a few years, THEN maybe we should consider using it. I will not be swayed by buzzwords and flashy demos.
The afternoon of April 25, I got news that “The Value of Prototypes” was selected for the conference. I was ecstatic. Especially in the wake of that previously mentioned impostor syndrome, it was so validating to know that I was specifically selected to speak in front of an audience of my peers. I just had to make sure I didn’t bomb it.
I started throwing together a few slides with ideas about prototypes, but nothing really came together as a cohesive product. Summer arrived and I didn’t get back to working on the presentation for months. About two weeks before the conference, I decided that I really needed to get a presentation together while I still had time to work on it.
I abandoned the slides and started working on a tentative script. It seemed easier to think through what I would want to say and then come up with a presentation to support it. I knocked out the script in probably an hour or less and ran it by some peers. Then, I made a new slideshow and made diagrams and slides to support my points. The process went way faster in that order.
Finally, I had to make sure I would fit within the “5 to 10 minute” time allowance for a lightning talk. I made a video performing the talk with just the slides and audio. It seemed like the best starting point, as I could get a quick bead on the duration, plus I could check if the cadence or delivery felt weird and adjust it. I sent the recording to a few people and asked for feedback. Technical peers, I wanted an opinion on whether the content seemed sound. Non-technical friends would be a better source for if the talk was delivered well.
Everyone seemed to like the talk well enough, but I was concerned about the time duration. My video came out to over 9 minutes, which would leave me very little room for error. Barry was very explicit that the window was not flexible. Any overage on one talk could potentially delay subsequent talks and throw off the entire schedule. I decided not to re-record, but simply note that I would need to deliver faster during the actual presentation.
I abandoned the slides and started working on a tentative script. It seemed easier to think through what I would want to say and then come up with a presentation to support it. I knocked out the script in probably an hour or less and ran it by some peers. Then, I made a new slideshow and made diagrams and slides to support my points. The process went way faster in that order.
Finally, I had to make sure I would fit within the “5 to 10 minute” time allowance for a lightning talk. I made a video performing the talk with just the slides and audio. It seemed like the best starting point, as I could get a quick bead on the duration, plus I could check if the cadence or delivery felt weird and adjust it. I sent the recording to a few people and asked for feedback. Technical peers, I wanted an opinion on whether the content seemed sound. Non-technical friends would be a better source for if the talk was delivered well.
Everyone seemed to like the talk well enough, but I was concerned about the time duration. My video came out to over 9 minutes, which would leave me very little room for error. Barry was very explicit that the window was not flexible. Any overage on one talk could potentially delay subsequent talks and throw off the entire schedule. I decided not to re-record, but simply note that I would need to deliver faster during the actual presentation.
The morning of the conference, I was super excited. My talk was right before lunch on the first day, so I got a couple of talks to acclimate and there would be plenty of conference after my talk to enjoy as a spectator. For the first three talks, I just sat and savored the experience. After the third talk, my time was getting closer and I wanted to be fully prepared and ready to go on stage. I repositioned near the setup desk and made sure my slideshow was ready to begin.
Knowing that the talks were being recorded, I told my wife that the talk would either go fine or it would be terrible. If it went particularly bad, I would live forever in infamy on YouTube. No pressure.
When my time had come, I got mic’d up and brought up my presentation as the MC introduced me. The common theme was to deliver a dad joke between talks. When my time began, I opened with my own joke. “How do you catch a unique rabbit? Unique up on it.” It fell flat, but there was nothing to be done about that. I got started with explaining the value of prototypes.
The previous lightning talks had been delivered at appropriately lightning pace. They hit the ground running and didn’t pause until they were finished. I adopted the same method and ended up a few minutes under estimate. My biggest concern was going over and throwing off the schedule, so I considered it a huge success to get in before the buzzer.
With my talk finished, I considered the weekend properly started. The rest of the talks on the first day were really interesting, especially one talk about the algorithms used by different dating sites. After the pressure of my own talk was removed, it was a cool experience to hear experts talk about their particular niches of the field.
Once the conference talks were finished, we met up at New Realm Brewing for the Happy Hour networking event. A serendipitous exchange with a waiter informed us of their “speakeasy” back room. It was convenient, because my peers and I get a little loud when we’re excited, so we didn’t have to worry about bothering the other patrons. We made small talk with speakers, exchanged business cards, and made plans to link up and discuss projects later.
The second day was much more about networking for me. I sat in for a few talks, but I wanted to make sure that I shook some hands and made some connections. My crew made a pass around the vendor tables and picked up some cool swag. We stopped at the Blue Ridge Consultants table because they had HOT SAUCE. Who has hot sauce freebies? Ended up talking to them about making mead and the SC laws around making and selling moonshine. They were cool guys.
There was also a vendor that had a contest for a Raspberry Pi 5 kit. The way they pulled you in was a set of locks and lockpicking kits at the table, but the full contest included things like trivia questions and a multi-user dungeon or MUD challenge. We tried our hands at lockpicking. I ended up getting two of them, but certainly not enough to justify spending time on the whole contest. Still, it was a neat idea.
After plenty of networking, a few more free bottle openers, and one final talk on lambda calculus and JavaScript, I was done. My social battery was depleted, my pockets were full of swag, and my brain was so bombarded with different ideas and architectures, I knew I wasn’t good for anything else. I said my farewells to the team, fist bumped a few speakers on the way out, and left Carolina Code Conference 2024 with cool souvenirs and good memories.
When professional photos were finally published, I had to see how bad mine were. In contrast to professional speakers, I realized just how animated I am. Between exaggerated shrugs and gestures that look almost like a dab, I look like a lunatic. Fortunately, it’s pretty representative of me.
I’m so thankful for the opportunity to speak at the conference and make a lot of new friends at the same time. It was really fun and I can’t wait for next year’s conference. Even if I don’t get selected to talk, I at least want to attend and link up with people there. It was a crazy experience and I can guarantee you I won’t ever forget my first tech conference.
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