CactusCon is Arizona’s premier hacker conference. Formerly known as BSides Phoenix, CactusCon is already on it’s 12th iteration and has come to grow extensively. This year was themed after the novel 1984.

The Southern California Linux Expo (or SCALE for short) is the largest community organized FOSS conference in North America. This years SCALE marks the 21st occurence, gathering together FOSS contributors, developers, sysadmins, hackers, and everything inbetween. Professionals and enthusiasts alike gather for scheduled and unscheduled talks around a myriad of topics such as infosec, observability, cloud, the kernel, databases, homelabs and other fun subjects.

This was my first year attending SCALE and I really enjoyed it.