Traditions

We have no idea what we're doing...so we're going to try everything and see what works.

Joel Taddei founded the Carolina Code Conference in 2018. At the 2023 welcome he was introduced as Royal Joel — a running honor for the person who started this gathering on a nothing budget and left a mark that stuck. Attendees still hunt down a selfie with #RoyalJoel during the weekend.

Every year we crowd-source a polyglot t-shirt: pick a song, then write the lyrics as code in as many languages as we can. Entries come in as pull requests. We assemble the best lines into one shirt you can actually read — and sing — as you go.

The 2027 challenge is Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline! Fork the GitHub repo, add a follow the README and send a PR. It is more important that the line reads well, than compiles.

In 2026 film student Cameron Wilkie took volunteers from the crowd and put together a short horror-comedy about AI taking over the industry! It was a blast and we hope to do it again.

The great folks at Circuit Board Medics may have started a new tradition at the conference too! In 2026, we had badges made out of circuit boards with a tiny screen, Wifi, led lights and open source code!

Conference attendees got very creative, loading up a playable Pacman, Doom, somebody started a proximity sensor cult, one guy even soldered an NES controller to the board to play original Nintendo games on an emulator!

Bringing cybersecurity together with programmers is a core mission of the conference each year. DEF CON 864 is Greenville’s local DEF CON group, has graciously run a programmer friendly Capture the Flag each year. It's a great chance to learn, compete, pick a lock and win a great hacking prize!

They run the contest on hard mode at BSides Greenville every year too!

There's ample opportunity to make great connections and new friends every year. We typically have Welcome Social the evening before the conference at GatherGVL, a big night out in downtown Greenville after the first day and then a relaxing wind down with a beverage at Fireforge when it's all done.

You come for the tech, come back for the people.

We started a podcast interviewing interesting tech people! Circulated on all of the podcast outlets (Apple, Spotify, etc), with video on both YouTube and Substack.

What's a pirate's favorite command?

rm -rf

Two arrrrrs. No survivors.

We tell terrible dad jokes between speakers and score our MC's based on how many groans they elicit from the audience. Yes, really.

What do you do when you have brand new social media accounts, some photos from 2018 and you need to get the word out about a polyglot conference? You ask for help...in code. We needed graphics for our social accounts so we may as well let people make them in their favorite languages.

So we did...which also led directly to our Lyrical Code t-shirts shortly afterward.

Each December the conference runs an Advent of Code private leaderboard. Solve puzzles, learn a language, and compete for Carolina Code Conference tickets. Make it weird.

From the first conference in 2018, lunch has come from Tropical Grille. Joel fed that first crowd well with it and Friday still runs on the same tradition.