Over this past weekend, a few people asked me how I heard of DerbyCon and why I started coming. Honestly, I didn’t have a good answer. I think it was because I saw it on Twitter, heard good things about it and just figured I’d give it a shot. Like many transformational things in your life, they sometimes happen when you’re not expecting it.
My first DerbyCon was 5.0, Unity. I had recently begun managing our application security team and I wanted to go to an event with them to get to know them better and start to build a relationship. Through our time in Louisville attending the conference we learned new things about our work and learned more about each other. We visited Churchill Downs on Sunday afternoon and Zanzabar in the evening. We yelled into each others’ ears during the parties and got pizza at Spinelli’s. Through all of this we learned to talk about things other than work and be brutally honest with each other. So yeah, mission accomplished.
In addition to the many friends I’ve made through the conference, I also was exposed to many new ideas and topics that I hadn’t been exposed to before. My first CTF was at DerbyCon. I remember the feeling of not having any idea what to do and how it inspired me to learn more. I remember trying to fool the polygraph in the SE Village and being told by the examiner that I was the most anxious person he’d seen in his entire life. He was exaggerating, I am sure.
One thing that really surprised me this year was how many people said this was their first DerbyCon. For those of you who didn’t have the chance to go to previous iterations of DerbyCon, let me share with you my favorite talks from past conferences:
DerbyCon 5:
- And You Shall Know Me By My Trail of Documentation by Jason Scott
- Dec0ding Humans Live by Chris Hadnagy
DerbyCon 6:
- How Are Tickets Paid For? by Abe Miller
- So You’ve Inherited a Security Department, Now What? by Amanda Berlin and Lee Brotherston
DerbyCon 7:
- I had my mom break into a prison, then we had pie. by John Strand
- Kali Linux? by Johnny Long
- Defending the Cloud: Lessons from Intrusion Detection in SharePoint Online by Matt Swann
DerbyCon 8:
- OSX/Pirrit — Reverse engineering mac OSX malware and the legal department of the company who makes it by Amit Serper, Niv Yona, and Yuval Chuddy
- The MS Office Magic Show by Stan Hegt, Pieter Ceelen
During the closing ceremony today, it became clear that DerbyCon has meant a lot to a lot of people. DerbyCon spawned friendships, foundations, careers, knowledge, and ideas. The amount of money donated to charitable organizations is staggering ($700K). DerbyCon has been a bright light in our community.
For all things in life, there is beginning and an end. What happens in between is up to us. Not everything that lives truly shines and fortunately for me and thousands of others, DerbyCon shined bright for nine years. For the light that this event brought to my life and career, I am grateful. Now it’s up to us to decide what happens next.
