Last week, I had the privilege of discussing Disaster Recovery Myths at the DEEP Conference. I also took the opportunity to attend several other presentations covering topics such as eBPF, open-source supply pipelines, tips for bug bounty hunters, and SSE.

TL&DR: I loved the experience ;)

Like the early years of Troopers, DEEP is still a boutique conference with a personal touch where the organizers care about the well-being of presenters and attendees. That alone would be a good enough reason to keep coming back.

But wait, it’s getting better. I’m always amazed at the caliber of presenters they manage to attract. The keynotes and many of the presentations I attended were fantastic.

Although the conference organizers rely on sponsors and thus have to include sponsor presentations, they’re also extremely good at managing those presenters. I attended several presentations by engineers working for security vendors, and none focused on products or commercial details. As you might expect, I couldn’t resist questioning the more egregious marketing claims like “SSE will replace VPNs” (with IPsec prominently visible in the SSE architecture slide). Still, even then, the presenter graciously acknowledged my point¹.

I hope to attend the next DEEP conference in October 2025, and it would be great to meet fellow networking engineers there (although we were a tiny minority, I did manage to find a few like-minded souls).