The days are shorter, the heating is turned on more frequently, and the final big conference week of the year for me ends with Blackhat Europe and BSides London.

Blackhat was held at the ExCeL and featured all the usual suspects. I had the chance to present at Blackhat and also caught up with Quentyn Taylor, who somehow social-engineered me into agreeing to a 5k run in the new year…

The vendor area felt a bit smaller compared to previous years, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was much easier to find or bump into people. I even ran into Joe Driver, whom I haven’t seen in 5 years since my last time at AlienVault—and the man hasn’t aged at all! Maybe Blackbox is feeding him some super-soldier serum.

BSides London was amazing as always. I even got to see my podcast hosts Thom and… err, the other one in person. We bumped into many others like Dan Raywood (who was the first industry news Stig), Mo Amin (my stunt double), (next) Jen Ellis, and many more.

The talks were top-notch as always, particularly in the rookie track. I especially enjoyed Egonna Anaesiuba-Bristol’s talk on a non-techie’s guide to breaking into cybersecurity as she shared her journey from lawyer to cybersecurity professional.

I also volunteered to be a mentor and was assigned Han, who was totally brilliant.

Getting up in front of people and speaking isn’t necessarily easy, especially if you’re new to it. But when you have technical glitches, things become even more complicated. That’s what happened to Han when her laptop didn’t connect to the projector, so she had to copy the presentation to another machine. This delayed the talk and messed up some of the formatting on the slides.

But Han handled it like a pro, and with it being the rookie track, the organizers and attendees were patient with the delay and supportive. This made it the right environment and a win for everyone, in my opinion.