If you’ve never been to a BSidesROC you may not know what to expect. Will there be coffee? Are the chairs comfortable? How many people will there be? Yeah.. yeah… You’ll find that out, but there are some bigger things you should know about before you arrive.

1. Bring your laptop for the CTF

We have the only (AFAIK) Battleship themed hacker competition. This is unlike any competition you’ve seen before – it is 100% random. There will be network hacking challenges, application security challenges. OSINT challenges, and challenges that don’t fit into a category. All of which will be played out in a Battleship style game board. Team up, or play alone, but you should make sure you bring your laptop. We’ll be giving away prizes for excellent CTF’ing.

2. Get a ticket to eat, or plan to walk across the street

Every year we do a survey of how we’re doing. This includes how much people enjoyed the food. We’ve been listening and decided to open up the options for food. We will be serving breakfast and lunch during the day. You can either buy the delicious food that we’ll be serving during the conference, or you can take a walk 20 yards in either direction to grab a bite at one of the shops in the area. We will be serving coffee and water for free throughout the day, and the bar will be open in the afternoon if you want soda or something harder.

3. Drinking will be permitted, driving not.

This is the first year we’re officially condoning drinking. Zeppa, the restaurant inside of the German House, has a full bar and we’ll be handing out drink tickets throughout the day. We don’t recommend drinking at 9am, but if you are thinking about having a few drinks, reach out on Twitter and see if you can carpool with people. There are a lot of bars in the South Wedge area so it might even mean that you can have a drink when the conference ends at 5pm. Parking will be much better this year with two reserved parking lots for us, as well as street parking in the neighborhood.

4. Get ready to learn about lock picking

Lock picking is a fun hobby for a lot of hackers. If you don’t know how to do this, guess what, we’ll teach you how easy and fun it is. The people that organize The Open Organization Of Lockpickers will be there giving demonstrations, showing how to pick locks (including the legality of it), and selling lockpick sets to let people practice.

5. Please show our sponsors love

Our sponsors are our life blood. These guys are giving us money to throw the conference that we want. These guys aren’t annoying advertisers, or companies trying to steal the stage to talk about their new products, these are companies that appreciate what a hacker community is, and that sharing knowledge benefits everyone. Find them on Twitter, Facebook, or even in person, and thank them.