June 15 & 16th, 2024, I was in beautiful Vancouver Canada with my colleagues Amanda McCarvill and Brandan Wu for the annual, local, moving conference that spreads the Pacific North West to give a talk, but it turned into so much more: OWASP AppSec PNW!
The night before was the speaker’s dinner, where I got to see Brandan, Farshad Abasi, Dana Epp, and so many others! Here’s me and Brandan at the party!
To start the conference on right, Dana Epp told us what was what (This is an AppSec conference and it’s going to be great!), and then Jeevan Singh gave a short speach to introduce the first amazing talk with Coleen Coolidge.
Then Coleen gave a REALLY amazing talk about how to not be a jerk security professional (I might paraphrasing).
After that I got to say “Hi!” to a lot of people, including some friends from Twillio! Ariel, the FOMO is real! 😛
More friends!
After that I gave my talk, 30 Tips for Securing JavaScript, but spoiler, there were way more than 30. ;-D
After that I just got to chill and watch all the other (great) talks, including Jason Haddix‘s talk on how to create your own AI BOTs to help with security and OMG I want to make my own bots now! I found it utterly fascinating. I really want to take his courses now.
I was, of course, wearing purple.
After lunch I was asked to be on a panel to talk about OWASP, representing the Victoria chapter (which I help with from time to time, it’s my home chapter! PS check us out if you’re local!) . Of course I said yes! Getting to sit with all my fav people to talk about one of my fav things (OWASP)? Hellz yeah!
At the end of day 1, all the volunteers got on stage and (of course) I took a photo. Then there was an after party where I got to hang with Jason, his (awesome) wife, and so many other amazing humans! I found out at that point that one of the people who was supposed to give a workshop was injured, so they were going to cancel it. I offered to give my “Adding SAST to CI/CD without loosing any friends” workshop and they said yes. Woohoo! More talking! We arranged it so I went in the morning and Brandon in the afternoon, because selfishly then I could go to Brandon’s workshop and learn more about writing Semgrep Rules.
Look at those wonderful volunteers!
The next day was my workshop, here’s some pics of me teaching all the Semgrep!
After that was Brandon‘s workshop. It was AMAZING. He had a skit at the start, special lighting and music. I’m glad I was before, not after, he has SO MUCH ENERGY. Plus, I managed to write rules! I was even on the leader board, woohoo, and ranked #8 in the class! GO ME. And Go Brandon!!!!
People could not get enough of him, they asked him questions forever. So I went and got Thai food with some other fun people from the conference and Amanda (who is also fun, just to be clear, she’s just not new to me). It was delicious AND fun, and Brandon made it in time for dinner!
All and all, for $64 CAD for 2 days of talks and trainings, that was a STEAL of a deal. I’m definitely going next year, which will be in Seattle. I had a total blast, and so did my team from work, and everyone else I spoke to. If I met you there, thank you for saying hi!