Notes from SOURCE Seattle

I got to attend my first SOURCE event last week, thanks to a lucky confluence of events which freed up my time.  Mainly, I didn’t have to go to the PCI Council’s Community Meeting and was able to take advantage of SOURCE Seattle instead.  I know many of the people involved in SOURCE and I’d been wanting to go for a long time.  This was the 10th SOURCE event, and I walked away very happy I’d finally been able to attend.

The Seattle conference is very different than any other event I’ve been a part of; with under 100 people in attendance, it’s small and personal.  I had the opportunity to talk to almost every person there, which is something you rarely get to say at any event these days.  During lunch on both days the team running the event led interesting discussions and helped encourage people to talk to other security professionals they’d never met before.

My favorite talk was by Tony Rucci, giving a detailed account of what it was like to be part of the White House staff on 9/11/2001.  It was interesting to hear the first hand account of someone who’d been on the ground at the time.  I liked getting to go to talks by friends like Adam Shostack and Zach Lanier, even if Zach did lose me about 15 minutes into his talk (I’m not an Android debugger by trade, so shoot me).  Robert M. Lee’s talk on the maturity of security was good to hear, but I feel he may be a bit optimistic.  The Base Rate Fallacy talk by Florer & Lowder made my brain hurt; my wife is currently taking a statistics class, maybe I should ask her for help.

I haven’t been to the larger SOURCE Boston, but if you’re in the Seattle area, look at coming to the con when it happens next year.  Hopefully it stays small and intimate for a few more years.  And hopefully it can stay in the Maritime Museum for a few more years as well.