Exceptional conference

This month I went to EHSM conference - exceptional hardware software meeting, which took place at DESY, Hamburg.

Talks and events

Conference covered a wide range of topics. There were talks about physics; vacuum, mass spectography; robotics - XRP projects; programming low level stuff such as fpga, porting netbsd, or even gui programming.

Some talks were better than others but everyone was at least interesting.

We shouldn't forget about the workshops too. There was a soldering workshop with Mitch Altman (founder of fameous hackerspace Noisebridge) and workshops on melting metal and forming glass. Apart from planned workshops were also spontanious ones. I attended a quick FPGA programming in migen workshop by Sébastien Bourdeauducq.

The best talks for me were:

• xrp project
• gui evolution programming
• quantum cryptography

However I missed some talks so, this ranking is by no means objective.

I also really liked photographs of Russia by Lana Sator.

People

People were pretty exceptional too. I've met a lot of new people. Conference wasn't big, rather surpraisingly small, but thanks to it size, meeting new people was less intimidating. I had a possibility to talk to almost every speaker I wanted and had some great conversations.

I've met people from US and mostly from Europe. There were lots of people from various hackerspaces, mostly from Germany, France and... Poland (me and three of my friends).

I was very excited to hear about various projects using FPGA, robotics, optics, mechanical stuff or computer vision (detecting asteroids, wow!).

Location

As I mentioned previously, conference was located at Germany, Hamburg in physics lab - DESY. It's second greatest particle accelerator in Europe!

I thought that travelling to DESY from Hamburg will be less convinient, but it was actually pretty near and took something like a half an hour from my hotel.

Unfortunately I couldn't visit DESY properly, because a decent tour was after I had already left Hamburg. However I wandered around the campus and it looked pretty cool.

Here is one of the exhibitions:

Conclusions

It was a really great trip. I've met amazing people and learned some new things and got so damn inspired. Hacker/maker community is really awesome.