Code on the Beach 2015

Aug 9, 2015

I was honored to be accepted to speak at Code on the Beach this year! (2015). Code on the Beach is an amazing conference down in Jacksonville, FL. I can't recommend it enough!

Location

The conference takes place at a 4 star resort called the One Ocean Resort. It's a beautiful resort inside and out. There's a mini bar in your room with free drinks, and snacks, turn down service, and the hotel employees are super friendly and will do anything you need.

The town is called Atlantic Beach. Within 100 feet is the Beaches Town Center. There are a bunch of great restaruants, and shops. Poe's Tavern, Flying Iguana, and M Shack were our favorite places, but there's a bunch more! Lemon Bar was also a really cool spot to hang and drink PiƱa Coladas, steps from the beach.

Conference

The conference was a really great time. The whole thing was very chill, yet organized. Registration was fun with all kinds of beach swag like beach balls, and squirt guns. The talks I attended were mostly in the Web and Cloud track and all had fantastic content. I learned a ton about web performance from Nik Molnar, brushed up on my React/Flux skills from Raymond McDermett, and then gave my talk to a PACKED room.

Thanks to Michael Crump for that tweet. We then ended the day with drinks provided by the conference/One Ocean, and Poe's which is a super fun restaraunt themed after Edgar Allan Poe.

Day 2 I woke up and had a great breakfast followed by a hilarious keynote by Stacey Mulcahy, followed by a bunch of great sessions from guys like Cecil Phillip on ASP.NET MVC6, another by Nik on Azure WebSites, and 2 by my friend David Neal, one on Node.js, and the other on Kanban. One of the best parts of day 2 though was the 2.5 hour beach break. There was a corn hole tourney, an Ice Cream Sunday bar, and plenty of time to relax by the ocean or the pool.

Day 3 got started with a great talk on F# by Jeremy Abbbot, then a fantastic intro to Aurellia by Ashley Grant. The conference was then final keynoted by the always amazing Elijah Manor talking about Growing as a Developer.

Conclusion

All in all, Code on the Beach was an amazing conference, and I cannot recommend it enough! Plus, it was my wife and I's 7th year anniversary so we really enjoyed our time together at the One Ocean Resort! I'm already excited to submit a talk next year so I can come again.