Conferences I look forward to in 2016
While I was still active in the Linux kernel development / network security field, I was regularly attending 10 to 15 conferences per year.
Doing so is relatively easy if you earn a decent freelancer salary and are working all by yourself. Running a company funded out of your own pockets, with many issues requiring (or at least benefiting) from personal physical presence in the office changes that.
Nevertheless, after some years of being less of a conference speaker, I'm happy to see that the tide is somewhat changing in 2016.
After my talk at 32C3, I'm looking forward to attending (and sometimes speaking) at events in the first quarter of 2016. Not sure if I can keep up that pace in the following quarters...
FOSDEM
FOSDEM (http://fosdem.org/2016) a classic, and I don't even remember for how many years I've been attending it. I would say it is fair to state it is the single largest event specifically by and for community-oriented free software developers. Feels like home every time.
netdevconf 1.1
netdevconf (http://www.netdevconf.org/1.1/) is actually something I'm really looking forward to. A relatively new grass-roots conference. Deeply technical, and only oriented towards Linux networking hackers. The part of the kernel community that I've known and loved during my old netfilter days.
I'm very happy to attend the event, both for its technical content, and of course to meet old friends like Jozsef, Pablo, etc. I also read that Kuninhiro Ishiguro will be there. I always adored his initial work on Zebra (whose vty code we coincidentally use in almost all osmocom projects as part of libosmovty).
It's great to again see an event that is not driven by commercial / professional conference organizers, high registration fees, and corporate interests. Reminds me of the good old days where Linux was still the underdog and not mainstream... Think of Linuxtag in its early days?
Linaro Connect
I'll be attending Linaro Connect for the first time in many years. It's a pity that one cannot run various open source telecom protocol stack / network element projects and a company and at the same time still be involved deeply in Embedded Linux kernel/system development. So I'll use the opportunity to get some view into that field again - and of course meet old friends.
OsmoDevCon
OsmoDevCon is our annual invitation-only developer meeting of the Osmocom developers. It's very low-profile, basically a no-frills family meeting of the Osmocom community. But really great to meet with all of the team and hearing about their respective experiences / special interest topics.
TelcoSecDay
This (https://www.troopers.de/events/troopers16/580_telcosecday_2016_invitation_only/) is another invitation-only event, organized by the makers of the TROOPERS conference. The idea is to make folks from the classic Telco industry meet with people in IT Security who are looking at Telco related topics. I've been there some years ago, and will finally be able to make it again this year to talk about how the current introduction of 3G/3.5G into the Osmocom network side elements can be used for security research.