DENOG17

2025-11-17 - My first real conference experience

As anyone that follows me on the Fediverse probably knows: I was at the DENOG17 conference, a week ago. (Here is the thread)

This is pretty much the first conference that I ever went to. And I went to it, out of my own interest and as myself.

As I have been diving into networking topics over roughly the last 1-2 years, I would often find myself without people to talk to about it. Most people I knew either privately or professionally, are not into this and when I tell them about how I decided to build an IPv6-only Kubernetes cluster, they look at me in confusion about why I would want to do that. They aren't able to understand the appeal that this has for me. And that's okay.

But, I wanted to find people that would have this as a common interest. So when I learned about DENOG this year and saw they were gonna host a local Meetup, right near me, very soon, I couldn't say no. I had a very nice evening there and was immediately sold on the idea of going to the big DENOG17 event in Essen. So past me made the smart choice of committing myself to going, by booking everything.

Thanks past me.

Going into this event, the things I wanted to do were:

• to meet some of the people I know only from online, in person
• to watch some talks on interesting topics and maybe learn a thing or two
• that's it

What I got was:

• a lot of good talks
• an opportunity to participate in a hands-on lab workshop about BGP peering (specifically on Arista EOS)
• a crash course into Mikrotik RouterOS (and a fun project)
• tons of screen time for my fediverse posts, on the idle rotation of the various screens (that was one was fun!)
• connections to way more people than I expected
• and lots of tips on how to best survive congress in December :D

I was kinda anxious going into it, but I am so incredibly happy about how it turned out. I felt simultaneously right at home and also often like the dumbest person in the room. Which is amazing, because I now know about and feel motivated to learn about many more things.

DENOG18 will be in Essen once again and I will certainly make the time to go there.

Also, here, have a few pictures of the event: