My first time!
It was my first time at a chaos event ever, so keep this in mind while reading this. Some things are myths that I heard before, some things truely flashed my brain and I was just overstimulated with so many things happening at the same time.
Where to start?
That is a good question. Probably one and a half years ago when I randomly stumbled on some talks from previous chaos events. I remember some awesome ones from (in no particular order) @David Kriesel, @leyrer, @marudor, @Michael Stapelberg and many many more awesome talks which inspired me to get hooked on more of those. These where the key indicator to get curious about things again. Again - because I had this mindset in the past, but somehow lost it a bit.
Now there’s a plan - right?
So with this plan, I tried to hook some friends to visit 37c3, but that was not as successful as I thought, because in the end I was not able to catch a ticket in time, so I postponed it and planned my first congress to 38c3!
This time I was prepared to catch a ticket in time. The whole madness and clicking refresh at the right millisecond! Aaaand - I caught a ticket! Awesome, directly booking a hotel, train ride - the whole trip was safe then.
Waiting until day 0
From there, I packed my stuff and waited for the travel day and regularly pressed refresh on all information I could catch to be prepared as best as I can. A good checklist that was recommended was the Congress Checklist of MacLemmon (A great resource to start every travel I found out).
Day 0 - Traveling to Hamburg and initial hurdles
What a smooth ride! All trains arrived in time and checking with @marudor’s - bahn.expert - tool (great tool btw) it felt even smoother. So not much to say here.
After arriving at the hotel, the first shock: My laptop didn’t boot because of the wrong M2-SSD I packed last second before catching my train. A thing which could have been prevented by not changing plans for equipment last minute. But nevertheless - a hacker congress without laptop? No way!
Day 1 - Congress madness starts
But after checking into congress, my first quest was to get a spare drive to boot my laptop off. After that being solved quickly, and installing a quick operating system on my laptop so I would be ready for the next few days - I was up and running in roughly 30 minutes.
After that time flies by
Day 1 - Day 4 are basically an experience I am really happy about. Seeing crazy creatures all around everywhere (at the end I heard it was 15.000 people!!) and watching them in their wild life was amazing. From people that learned to solder, to people which modified and programmed everything they could find (e.g. flip boards, travel information boards, led-matrices everywhere) - even an ATM was hacked and you could play games on it - to people which are at the code base of what we use in our daily lives, I was catching some conversations of people which found bugs in sudo or doas (which are critical tools if you’re server maintainer e.g.). So basically it was a village of everything which popped up for 4 days just to magically disappear again. I mean there are all the assemblies and hackspaces from all over Europe which just come here to meet up in person and achieve crazy projects.
Of course this was an effort of many so-called angels, which of their own will made this crazy effort to keep the congress alive. From legal requirements up to maintaining and helping to make the congress a safe place to be! What they actually achieved, you can see in the infrastructure review which is just mind blowing to watch as a first timer to a chaos event!
So what’s the conclusion?
Would I do this again?
ABSOLUTELY YES!! - This is absolutely amazing and there is no doubt that I will be at the next congress!
Would you recommend this congress or other chaos events?
Also Yes! - This is an experience which you can’t describe in a blog post or even in talks with people. This is something which needs to be experienced by anyone individually.
What are your next steps?
Watching all the talks I missed in person because there was so much to experience onsite! And after that, looking for assemblies nearby to join and see what they’re up to.
What’s left to say?
Thanks to all the amazing creatures which made this wonderful experience possible and also thanks to your attention for reading through my post! Have a nice day and see you in the next one!