Things seldom happen by themselves, but when they do, there is luck, help and sweat involved. — Unknown
If you ever find yourself at the Chaos Communication Congress, you may eventually snap out of your awestruck haze to realise you probably want a memento to bring home. This happened to me at last year’s event, and while I usually go for a t-shirt or a hoodie, this time I found something unexpected and much, much better!
The 2018 edition of the congress (35c3) was at the Neue Messe in Leipzig – a huge place with a central glass-roofed hall more than 200m long and nearly 100m wide. Along those walls you could find the t-shirt queue, where several thousand attendees plus myself were standing in swaggy expectation, looking for anyone nearby interested in conversation.
Lucky me, I found myself next to some friendly Finns, whose assembly was very close to mine (Hackeriet). Yay for neighbours! Introductions were made and among those, I met Joona, which worked for Let’s Encrypt on Certbot and ACME-DNS things.
When meeting a person that does something interesting, I usually go…
Ooh, that’s interesting! Would you like to come and give a presentation and perhaps a workshop about that?
A couple weeks later, dates and details were decided.
Joona was to travel to Oslo in April and across three days offer a presentation, a workshop and a Q&A session. For buzz and venues we’d cooperate with the Norwegian chapter of the Internet Society, the Norwegian Unix Users Group, and of course with Hackeriet – a natural place for anyone interested it these topics. To cover travel, hosting and dietary expenses we applied for support from the NUUG Foundation. Applications were sent, venues booked and all went smoothly and everyone agreed this would be cool.
The result
Frankly speaking, this whole thing went very smooth. Joona arrived as scheduled, we had a pleasant few days, and througout the events Jonna was exceedingly helpful with all our questions. We got to hang out, learn a lot about both technical issues, history and practical use of the tech, and we had good food and drink to make it all so much nicer. In sum, we learned a lot and enjoyed doing it.
Slides for his presentations have been published,
Thanks
This event wasn’t possible to organize without Joona’s approachability and friendliness, or without financial support we got from NUUG Foundation, our co-organizers, The Norwegian Unix Users group and ISOC Norway, or our venue providers Teknologihuset and Hackeriet.
Thank you! 😄