Carolina Code Conference speaks many (coding) languages

If there is a stereotype that can be applied to coders, especially in these days of remote work, it might be the image of an isolated individual sitting in front of a computer in their home, living solely within the world of glowing screens.

This is an image Barry Jones is working to dismantle.

As the organizer behind the Carolina Code Conference, a gathering of Upstate coders set to be held late this summer, Jones is serving as an evangelist not only of the Upstate’s coding ecosystem but of creating community beyond the screen.

“It’s particularly important, because personally when I started speaking at these local meet-up groups about a decade ago, it was a point where my career really shifted significantly,” Jones said. “When you start promoting the things you’re working on and sharing with other people at these events, the networking impact is pretty major.”

It’s especially important in this moment, Jones said, as many of the in-person gatherings between coders had fallen by the wayside in 2020 with the arrival of the pandemic. The Carolina Code Conference is one of them. Held in 2018 and 2019, the conference will be returning for the first time in four years on Aug. 19 at Greenville ONE downtown, and Jones said rekindling that community is vital for individuals and the ecosystem as a whole.

And, that community has grown. One result of the pandemic has been the influx of remote workers relocating to Greenville for its sunshine and better livability compared to larger metro areas, and tech workers were key in that shift. With the dust of the pandemic now clearing, Jones expects numerous newcomers to emerge into the sunshine of a quietly prospering coding community.

“We had a great tech community even before 2020, but since then a lot of people live in the area who are working remote, and it’s created this really interesting environment,” Jones said. “What we need to do is start leveraging that again.”

Polyglot gathering

This year’s conference will also be unique in that its attendees will be multilingual.

That is not to say there will be coders speaking English, Spanish, French and so on — although surely there will be many who do indeed speak languages other than English — but is instead in reference to the coding languages that are prevalent in the industry.

Whether JavaScript, .Net, SQL, Ruby or Python, these languages share common core elements but offer a wide range of capabilities in terms of coding speed, memory efficiency, technical opacity and so on.

“When I was in college, I was naive enough to believe the language they started teaching us would be the only one I would ever need,” Jones said.

That notion was promptly shattered, and these days keeping up with sometimes as many as a dozen languages is crucial to those looking to flourish in the modern coding landscape.

“That’s why we want to make this a place where the entire tech community of the Upstate can get together once a year and really make it a place where everyone can participate,” Jones said.