AppSec Day 2018 conference has finished up for the year and what a ride it has been! This was the third year we have run the AppSec Day conference, doubling in size every year, which has it’s difficulties, but is worth the experience and the reward it brings. When receiving mostly positive feedback from attendees and those involved and the satisfaction of working with a highly passionate team of volunteers, who all worked really well together, to pull off a successful event. Below are some of the highlights from the day…
We always start the year of planning and organisation with our goals and aims in mind. Looking at the results, I’d say we have achieved them!! Go Team :)
AppSec Day core aims
- Provide a welcoming environment for all technology professionals with a focus on attracting people not working directly within the security industry (e.g. developers, testers, devops engineers, students, etc).
- Present attendees with several diverse opportunities (talks, workshops, etc) to learn how to produce secure and defendable web and mobile products.
- Attract experts from around the world that not only know their stuff technically but that can also articulate their ideas and concepts clearly to an engineering audience.
- Keep the conference accessible to students and engineers that don’t have large training budgets.
- Adhere to the OWASP core attributes, specifically around vendor neutrality, inclusion, diversity and openness.
Conference Highlights
- 102 people attended the two day training courses before the event.
- 650 conference tickets sold, with 550 turning up on the day.
- ~70% attendees not working full time in a security role (i.e. developers, etc).
- 21 sponsors supported the event to make it possible financially.
- 25 speakers and trainers (7 international).
- 4 parallel talk tracks.
- Complimentary breakfast, coffee, tea, lunch, afternoon tea, t-shirt, after party with drinks and food.
The team & work involved
- ~800 emails were sent throughout the year.
- 135 Trello cards completed.
- ~10 hours work per week between the team over the full year.
- 6 volunteer staff in total helping during the year and on the day.
Lessons learnt
- Engage a proper, paid venue. The venue this year was awesome but involved too much effort to make it work, slowed us down a fair bit and we definitely maxed out the capacity.
- We underestimated how many volunteers we would need in the morning of the event as the registration line was around the corner and we needed more people to help direct attendees into the main lecture hall.
- We oversold tickets to the event and had to setup an overflow room for the keynote in the morning. The rest of the day was fine as we had 4 parallel streams.
Most talk recordings can be found on the AppSec Day Youtube channel.
Till next year!!
