CoderCruise 2018: Now that’s how you SHIP code!

Mike Stowe
Sep 6, 2018 · 7 min read

Ahoy! I know what you’re thinking — I WISH I WOULD HAVE BEEN AT CODERCRUISE 2018!!! I mean, 4 days at sea combined with 28 sessions, all you can eat buffets, shows, excursions, and three days of jokes by yours truly!

If you were able to make it — here is a friendly reminder of some of the things we did! And if you missed it, don’t worry there’s always next year (and here’s some incentive to sign up early!!!).

Kicking Things Off

We started things off with an incredibly efficient boarding process (seriously, it took us less than 15 minutes to get on the ship), started off with a light lunch (well, I had a light lunch, others had heavier, or more, um, alcoholic lunches). At roughly 4:00 we had our safety drill (the least fun experience of the whole trip)… but at 5:00pm the real fun started as we kicked off the conference with an opening keynote and all the drinks you could ever want!

For the cruise we ended up taking over Degas, Blues, and Alfred’s — each room blocked off for us and the conference during our sessions.

Of course, what good is an opening keynote/ welcome reception without some awesome swag? We brought stickers, bottle openers (because is it really a party without a RingCentral bottle opener), and glow sticks — to brighten up everyone’s day — especially for the kids on board — even the 20 year old ones ;)

After an amazing introduction by Eli White from One for All Events, LLC, I had the chance to jump up on stage and welcome the 120 attendees to this year’s conference. I even had the chance to tell a few jokes (which is probably why Eli is hiding behind the column).

Actual Conference Talks!

Topics ranged from Writing Great Software to Don’t Eat Grandma (common technical writing mistakes), with fifteen minute breaks between each to give everyone plenty of time to get to the next session (and grab a drink at the bar).

For RingCentral, Paco Vu kicked us off with a great talk on using artificial intelligence to improve customer experiences — ranging from voice transcription, to sentiment, to real-time information lookup.

John Wang, RingCentral’s Director of Platform, then shared his secret to being in the top 1% of StackOverflow users — and more importantly, how to build and manage your reputation as a developer.

I then took a look at the future of APIs with my talk on modern API technologies including REST, GraphQL, modern hypermedia specifications, and techniques for chaining API calls together — giving us the best of both worlds.

For our last RingCentral talk we took a look at how to use RingCentral’s APIs, bots, and widgets to easily add RingOut, voice, text, and meeting capabilities to any app with just a few lines of code.

We even tested the Ship’s wifi (or significant lack thereof) to connect with RingCentral’s platform to make real calls and send real text messages in the Atlantic ocean!

Not Your Average “After Parties”

Before and after sessions attendees had the chance to attend live shows, concerts, comedy clubs, dive-in movies, hang out in the pool, show their kids how to use the water slide, or just grab a beer and relax — watching the sun set over the ocean.

Before sessions the second day, attendees could hit the beach on Carnival’s private island: Half Moon Cay. On the island you could visit one of the many bars, play sand volleyball or court basketball, sun bathe on the white sand, or take a swim into the warm, clear, turquoise water as the ship sat off in the distance.

The third day meant a brief stop at Nassau, where you could take part in one of many of the excursions which included boat tours, hikes, swimming with dolphins, Snuba (a combination of snorkeling and scuba), bike rides, and more! Or you could take a tour of the city, visit the Pirate Museum, or emerge yourself in motion controlled virtual reality experiences (like bungee jumping for those terrified of heights).

The Hackathon

While there was plenty of fun to be had on the ship, you didn’t have to be on board to participate in our Communications on Cruise hackathon. The hackathon, with amazing partners including Google, SendGrid, Shopify, and Nomad PHP challenged the 277 participants to revolutionize the way we communicate, and offered prizes ranging from gift cards, to an Oculus VR Touch System, and a grand prize of tickets to next year’s CoderCruise!

And wow, did they respond!!!

Projects included Manu Gupta’s EHR as a solution service to provide transparent and reliable medical data records in the cloud, letting those in the medical field create DICOM from a medical png/jpeg image!

Or using geofencing and drones to send notifications via RingCentral and Sendgrid — imagine receiving a text when your package or perhaps in the near future pizza is about to arrive!

Mayuresh Bharmoria saw a huge opportunity to help train employees by creating a Corporate Phishing Simulator to warn employees (and their employer) of dangerous activities, and train them to recognize phishing emails.

Check out all the hackathon projects on our Hackathon website!

A One of a Kind Experience

I think it’s fair to say that CoderCruise is a Developer Conference and experience like no other. Code, networking, family, food, fun, and the Bahamas all wrapped up into a very quick 4 days.

At RingCentral we are grateful for the opportunity to partner with One for All Events, CoderCruise, and all the attendees of this year’s conference to create this unique experience, and not just help developers grow their careers and create impactful code — but create memories.

So to all of this year’s attendees — thank you for letting us be part of such a great conference. And if you couldn’t make it this year — be sure to look for CoderCruise 2019!!!

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See all of our upcoming events and don’t forget to register for our annual conference in San Francisco — ConnectCentral. This year’s conference features a one of a kind developer zone, dedicated developer track, hands on support from the people behind the RingCentral Platform, and more — all for just $99. Plus the first 50 attendees to sign up with discount code “CC18-DEVELOPERS” will receive a free pair of JDL headphones!!!

RingCentral Developers

Cloud Business Communications

Mike Stowe

Written by

Developer, actor, and a *really* bad singer. Fan of APIs, Microservices, and #K8s.

RingCentral Developers

Cloud Business Communications

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