BSidesSF 2023 - Closing Ceremony (Reed Loden)

hello hello everybody oh hi everybody yay [Applause] [Music] thank you so much for coming um to closing ceremony I know it's not a lot of people it's just me ranting about things not ranting but talking about kind of how the event went giving you some uh some numbers announcing some prizes and such but really do appreciate you being here so first of all I want to say just thank you for participating um again one of our key aspects about b-sides is that there are no attendees everybody is a participant everybody has something to add to the conversation and we think that is extremely critical um so again thank you for the last two days of awesome conversations

um I've heard a lot of great things uh from folks and I hope you've had a good time as well um so let's talk about uh attendance by the numbers um so we closed out uh with almost 2 000 total participants um so it's broken down into about 1400 attendees um over uh uh 113 presenters about 200 volunteers uh 50 villagers 130 sponsor reps um about 30 leads and staff and then a few other groups as well um and so uh just uh again this is a great number uh we're still building up obviously from where we were in 2020 the pandemic changed things of course but really happy with this number and so thank you all again for coming

yeah so so just some talk this we had the the highest number of presentations this year that we've ever had both submit in terms of submissions and in terms of actual talks um so we've hoped that you actually enjoyed the stuff because we had uh it's been a lot of work to put that together uh especially on our presenter Ops Team um and so I just want to you know give a shout out to them specifically for all the work that they put into this um and specifically every all the things that are happening here as you can see like the the key net thing that I found interesting here is the over 1400 emails

sent out to all the presenters uh coordinating everything making sure everything went well for that and so I just want to give a shout out to all of our presenters and all the presenter Ops team as well for that so yes indeed so yeah if I had 78 total presentations and workshops um and we got a lot of good feedback again I would say that if uh well actually we'll get to this later so um let's take a look talk a little bit about Capture the Flag so uh 54 challenges completed um about 700 players about 500 teams um and about 300 with it that at least solved one challenge um so uh the winners on-site winners and

if you're here I have things for you um so let's start with uh third place backspace Mutiny awesome

cool okay

let's just have everybody come up so let's do uh the meow team in second place are they here cool awesome and in first place I have no idea how to pronounce this cyber mufflance foreign again fantastic job on that and we'll get you if you stand right here I'll get you your prizes in just a second um cool let's talk about our Villages uh we had some awesome villages this year we had several new Villages so we had the cloud Village uh the bug bunny Village and we also had a reimagined career Village um so if you I hope you had a chance to check out every one of the villages I did and some great conversations and

things happening at each of them I really did love the career Village I thought there was some really awesome talks or you know conversations happening there helping people out especially in this uh you know current economic climate um you know there's been a lot of riffs and and such that have been happening uh across the tech industry and such across every job really and so we want to make sure that we're able to to support people to make sure that like hey um besides is a great place for networking that you can meet those people that are the companies that are still hiring and actually talk to the hiring managers get to know them and I

know that several actual interviews have already been set up for this upcoming week as a result of that Village so I just want to uh you know call out that specifically I hope everybody was able to take advantage of the free headshots as well I saw long lines for that so hopefully uh there'll be some some great yes indeed some great headshots for people's LinkedIn and other profiles that people can use as a result of that um T-shirt proceed donations consider our three uh t-shirt Charities this year noise Bridge eff and tectonica every one of these treasure uh Charities is going to receive anywhere between like 500 and a thousand dollars minimum each awesome yes major shout out to that and then we

also raised uh twelve hundred dollars for the San Francisco Habitat for Humanity for getting rid of old t-shirts that we just didn't want to keep anymore um and so that was awesome as well let's give a shout out to that so that is a lot of money that we have raised for charity um thanks to you all so appreciate that um talk about the network um so we have our own knock team that actually runs our network uh for us we had this year a 250 Meg uplink from symmetric uplink from webpass we also had starlink backup as well both were actually running um and so a bunch of different access points uh 450 Wi-Fi clients uh only 230

clients on peep come on folks like come on you know this is a security conference here um but then we were able to something that we've been trying to do and uh has not gone super well in the past but I think I think went pretty well this year was actually streaming talks Live on YouTube working on improving that for future years as well yes we had a lot of people that weren't that reached out to us and like hey I cannot intend in person but I want to watch it live like we know you do it after the fact that talks after the fact but like we want to watch it live so I'm very happy that we

were able to enable that for folks again we do have all the talks will be available uh on YouTube in about two weeks yourself so give us a couple of weeks and then we'll have all that so I'm just gonna again shout out to the knock team because they work endlessly to make sure everything works well uh with the network and such so thank you again for that additional stats um 1500 Swag Bags we gave away 450 t-shirts uh 50 different prizes raffled off I hope all of you were able to participate I participate in the raffle there were some really awesome prizes there five break dancers that leaped over four participants um at last night's party so hope you all

stayed late to actually see that that was pretty crazy uh we got locked out of our Instagram instacart account twice um and and thank you so much to the instacart trust and Safety and Security teams for helping us out with that getting that fixed and we got one live stream blocked because of a copyright thing as well so you know that's that's how it goes when you run an event and the crazy things happen and and also in an infinite number of stairs climbed as a result of the escalator uh stopping so I appreciate that are you working with us we can only do so much stuff on those things but thank you for being patient

with us and um and really do appreciate it again this this conference would not happen without all the participants that actually come to it uh well deserves thanks so I want to do a shout out to to my team of leads and staff that actually help year round to put this event on um there's about 30 of us total leads are kind of like the apartment heads and the staff or the the folks that are working on the department and so I just want a major shout out to them I'm actually going to say each of their names because I think that's that important Aaron Alex Korean Crystal Ian Isaac Juanita Lauren Megan Ming Nick

Parker Ricky Ryan Sarah Steve Tanya and Zach Benjamin Eric ghost Jason Jitters Mr M Ray shufig Ted Tom and Yash so let's give a major Round of Applause to everybody there if this conference would not be possible with all the all the people there so additional uh thanks to everybody and our call for papers review panel um they captured the flag puzzle Masters and our knock as well so let's give another round of applause for all these folks as well thank you uh again but uh those 30 people yes they're amazing and they work year-round but like what we also depend on is our volunteers to help us out for actually put this conference on and so we had

about 200 volunteers helping out on a variety of different things um with a variety of different uh jobs and such and you see the new job out of this year stair monitor awesome uh so we had uh 375 shifts filled for a total of 1 261 hours worked and that's amazing I really do appreciate all the hard work that our volunteers have put into this um I know that it can be tough for everything running around and plans changing like crazy we know a lot of volunteers stepped up and actually worked extra shifts because of the incident or with stairs and the escalator and such helping us out with direct traffic and such so really do

appreciate everybody there so I again want to shout out to all of our volunteers lost whew uh so one thing we started a couple years ago was doing challenge coins we actually haven't talked about it at closing ceremonies but I wanted to shout out uh to all the folks this year challenge coins are something that we do where uh somebody has been just done an extra special thing uh for this year and so I'm not going to call out every one of these names um but these are all the people that received a challenge coin this year for just helping out in some way that was extra special to the to the conference and so let's give a round of applause

again to everybody on this list here because they did something special and like really helped to make this conference possible again but uh you know all this is true but we would not be able to put a conference on especially in San Francisco without the money from our sponsors I'm just gonna be very Frank it is a very expensive conference we are the uh most well we are the third biggest uh b-sides in the world um first being Vegas second being besides Canberra actually in Australia um uh the um it we are the most expensive by far uh besides event in fact I bet if you put all their budgets combined it's still less than Arts

um just because this is San Francisco which is one of the most expensive places to run an event like this um and so and we try to make sure that we can provide everything for you uh not just the talks and everything else but but food and drinks as well and so uh you know specifically want to call out uh our four leading sponsors Adobe appiro code red partners and Google but all these sponsors here uh contributed in some way I really hope that you were able to actually go visit them at their booths get to know them you know a lot of them are hiring as well and so be able to talk to them see what positions

they have open or maybe you know if there's something that you want to talk to them like hey baby you'll uh actually you start using their product or something we had some really awesome sponsors that have really cool products and services as well so again I want to do a shout out to all the all of our sponsors it really means a lot we know that we can be a hassle sometimes to deal with on things so to make sure everything goes smoothly so thank you for working with us on this but let's give a round of applause to all of our sponsors yes hey thank you um and uh all that said we do need help

again it's a 100 volunteer run organization all of us have day jobs um you know not none of us are paid anything to do this uh and so uh but we need to need other other help especially because of the pandemic people have moved or they've you know changed roles and everything else and they may not have the time or something um so we're looking always looking for more folks to help us out uh it does require non-trivial time commitment I'll just be very Frank um you know we do we we meet we meet weekly on things we have leads that own departments and we have staffers that work on those departments um please express interest if you have

any kind of interest in this go to besides.org jobs and sign up we'll be reaching out after uh the event um to get in touch and see how we can help us you know have you work with us and make uh 2024 and future events uh even more successful so again uh you know for for folks that may have an interest there please do Reach Out uh give us feedback uh so again you know this is we go through every single piece of feedback that people give us and so the two ways that we want feedback generally sent to us is uh any kind of General feedback go to besides sf.org feedback there's a form you can fill out

there um to uh to actually provide feedback uh and then if you have any specific session feedback so say you want to talk or something else or any of the other like Villages and such like that there is on the schedule you can actually click that at the bottom of that you can provide feedback that way we go through every single piece of feedback so it really does mean a lot um is a perfect example several years ago we had so many complaints about the coffee like it was like the worst coffee ever things like that and so we've gone out of our way I think we're on our fourth coffee vendor but we seem to be a

success we've had lots of folks that love the coffee and espresso uh that we have yes so it took a while but like we're working it we iterate we a B test um so you know we try to find stuff that works so we really do appreciate the feedback we take it to heart we make sure that we can improve things for for future events so please do provide us any kind of feedback there um and with that we're over so thank you so much for coming to B-side San Francisco 2023. awesome yay hope to see you next year for besides NF 2024 um we'll be sending out uh more information on that soon the date on the

back of the program is actually wrong so don't put that on your calendar um we'll be uh sending out more information on that uh in the coming months so again thank you so much for coming uh have a great evening um you don't have to go home but you can't stay here so yeah please uh thanks everybody yeah yeah no after party tonight sorry I wish unless you want to help clean up like we're always happy to have have help uh tearing things down and cleaning things up but otherwise thank you again and have a great rest of your evening thanks