This week I went to Cybersec Europe for two days. I wasn’t totally sure what to expect going in, but it turned out to be a really good experience and I wanted to write a bit about it.

The people

The best part was definitely the people. I went in not really knowing what to expect, and I came out having had so many good conversations. I talked to engineers, a couple of founders, and even some researchers whose work I’d only read about before. Everyone was way friendlier than I thought they’d be.

People sometimes ask me how I ended up studying cybersecurity. There isn’t one clean answer — it was more like a slow drift that started a long time before I knew what “cybersecurity” even meant.

The first PC

I got my first computer when I was 10. It was an old laptop running Windows 7 — nothing special, just something someone in the family wasn’t using anymore — but to me it was the most interesting thing in the house.