This year I had the pleasure to attend the 34C3 – Chaos Communication Congress – in Leipzig. Between Xmas and New Years Eve I gathered with 1500 (!) hackers, nerds and other great people in the Messe Leipzig, which is huge! Thanks to @toyear btw who sold one of his tickets; buying my own was impossible since there were only three particular dates for buying regular tickets and the contingent was sold out immediately.

The event was massive in all aspects. Large, glowing art works, huge assemblies of hacker communities, big speakers and wide audiences. I mainly attended to meet up with Michael Christen from the peer-to-peer search engine YaCy. Hanging out with him and Mario Behling – the two of them currently programming Susi.ai – was great fun! Altogether I got a really good insight in their work practices and the community at large. And: everyone was really friendly. Not fake friendly, I mean really friendly. And there were lots of kids too. To sum up, if you are interested in open tech, free software and hacking hardware that’s the place to go. Yes, the most useful thing I learnt there was lock picking!!