My moves for Hacker Summer Camp 2026

...and away we go!

Here's (roughly) what I'll be up to this week:

Monday

BSides Las Vegas for the I Am The Cavalry and [un]prompted Tracks. There are a tonne of great talks, including the Monday Keynote from Leonard Bailey talking through how our community directly influenced changes to the DMCA and the CFAA (...it'll be the first time he has shared that story from the "inside view").

Tuesday

• BlackHat Startup Spotlight Competition. I'm looking forward to this one, and excited to heckle Trey Ford and Hollie Hennessy on the panel.
• Decibel Game Day. I'll be doing a panel with Zakir from Censys and old mate Jonathan Cran from Mallory on "Zero Day Countdown - The Myths of Mythos" talking about the state of the art in frontier-led vulnerability discovery and exploit development, and the impact it's having on real-world exploitation. If you're a founder or founder-in-waiting and you've never been to a Decibel event before I highly recommend registering and checking it out - The stuff these guys do with the cybersecurity founder community is absolutely extraordinary (and I have a pretty high bar on that).
• BlackHat Review Board Dinner: This is the BlackHat exhale moment for the "Motrin Crew" <3

Wednesday

• BlackHat day. General catchups, walking the floor and checking out what's what, and actually attempting to catch a few talks this year...
• Then Vulnerability Vibes, and Vibes Not Vendors in the evening (sooooo many vibes rn), capped off by evening things at the place I left the thing that time.

Thursday

• Thursday is always "calendar train-smash" day, but yeh... but DEF CON 34 is a gooooo. I'll be doing the blur thing with a couple of Policy Roundtables and meetups, then swinging through the Bugcrowd Hive in the evening in between a couple of other events (including the [un]prompted AI Security Researchers Party)... That's gonna be a good one.
• Also good, Greynoise Noisefest 👀

Friday

• Policy @ DEF CON will be in full effect... I'm on the review board and there are some phenomenal talks this year - Make sure you check the overall track out if the intersection of cyber, AI, policy, and safety is something that floats your boat.
• Speaking of which, at 4:30pm in W210-W211 I'll be on stage with some fellow jerks as a mock Congressional Testimony Witness for the "Filibuffer Overflow" - We did this in the Senate Hearing Room for Hackers on the Hill earlier this year and it was awesome... It's a mock hearing between industry experts and actual Capitol Hill and White House staffers, and its purpose is to show y'all the process and how it works for when it's your turn. Plus it's just generally a hoot and a really good time, the folks onstage have all been doing the stuff together for many, many years now and it gets a bit rowdy :)
• Then it's the Policy @ DEF CON mixer, and on to slopcon.org (think "whose slide is this" but with AI-generated presentations and an emphasis on the absurd... I'll be on stage for this one as well).

Saturday and Sunday

• After Friday is done it's all pretty loosey-goosey, Saturday and Sunday are for hanging out with folks, checking out the villages and rooting for my friends, and general DEF CON shenanigans.

If you see me around, come say hello! I'm looking forward to catching up with the usual suspects, meeting new folks as well, and handing out stickers :) I'll be swanning around chatting with folks about disclose.io, and I'm always down to jam with founders, policy jerks, and people working on VR/capdev, ops, and AI security.

See y'all soon!