BSides London took place last Wednesday the 24th on the Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall near High Street Kensington tube station in London.
I was really looking forward to this year’s edition as for the first time ever Dradis Pro was a sponsor in a security event. There are a lot of lessons learned on that front alone, but I’ll save them for another post.
It was a really long day. I only finished the slides for the Creating Custom Dradis Framework Plugins workshop around midnight the night before and I got to the venue by 8am to give the organisers a hand with the preparations. On the bright side, we had a really good turnout on the workshop:
Creating Custom Dradis Framework plugins in action (more pics)
I think that the final head count was around 500 people both from around the country and from abroad. The downside is that we had to prepare around 500 tote bags with sponsor swag, the upside is that some sponsors provided some really nice goodies 😉
The truth is that running an event such as BSides is a ton of work, and the team do it for free. And it doesn’t cost a penny to attend and you get a really nice free t-shirt:
I don’t think people thank the organisers enough. Thanks guys! To both the visible faces of the organisation but also to the rest of the conference goons that make all the little moving parts of the event tick.
As usual in this type of event, it’s easy to let yourself be distracted by the social side of things. I managed to finally catch up with a lot of Dradis Community contributors and Dradis Pro users. And hopefully meet a few future ones 😉 I finally put a face to some of the #dc4420 peeps and manage to catch up with some people that I no longer get to see that often.
It always baffles me that after working for a company for the last 5 years you get to meet some of your colleagues in a random security event instead of in the office or in an official company event. I guess that’s the nature of the industry we are on though. It was also good to catch up with ex-colleagues from previous lives.
Even though the scheduling gods decided I had to miss Marion & Rory’s workshop in the morning, I managed to get myself a WiFi Pineapple after Robin’s, just in time to rush to the main hall to catch the closing ceremony.
And before you realise it, the day was over and you are having a pint too many at the official BSides after-party…