QueryCon 2019 — an Osquery Conference by Trail of Bits and Kolide

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr Querycon 2019 is finally happening and our great friends at Trail of Bits are hosting the event in New York City!

When: June 20th-21st

Where: Convene at 32 Old Slip in downtown Manhattan, just steps from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange.

Call For Papers: https://www.papercall.io/querycon19

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/querycon-2019-tickets-59900912241

Trail of Bits Blog Post: https://blog.trailofbits.com/

Last year, Kolide was proud to found and host the inaugural Osquery conference which we simply named QueryCon.

As a burgeoning VC-backed startup, inventing a conference for an open-source project isn’t something you find in the standard playbook. In fact, when we were planning the conference, we weren’t quite sure if anyone would even show up! All we knew is we wanted to host a fun event where we could all passionately discuss and celebrate a project that has contributed immensely to the open-source security ecosystem.

Fortunately, all the hard work paid off and QueryCon was an incredible success beyond our wildest imagination selling out all 120 seats in our cozy theater months before the event was to be held. Even better, we got to play host to an impressive group of speakers including several from Facebook’s core development team.

QueryCon 2018 stretching the limits of the fire code in the tiny theater inside of the Palace of Fine Arts

QueryCon Happy Hour @ Schroeder’s in San Francisco

Since last June, a lot has changed in the Osquery community and at Kolide. Specifically, the team and I are heads down focusing on improving our SaaS product (in fact, we will be making an exciting announcement about it very soon) and worried that we wouldn’t have time to hold a conference up to our standards in 2019.

With the conference’s existence on the line, I reached out to Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits, and a long-time friend to Kolide to ask for his help. If you aren’t aware, Trail of Bits has been a major contributor to the Osquery community since its inception. Besides giving two talks at last year’s event, their team partnered with Facebook’s Osquery core team and added Windows support to the project in 2016. On top of that, they are regular contributors to Osquery core and its extension ecosystem. They are even starting a community driven version of Osquery called osql to help get the community back on its feet after the recent logjam in the core project.

With a resume like that, it was no surprise Trail of Bits was eager to help out and take over running the conference this year. Not wanting to leave them totally on their own, Kolide will be sponsoring this year’s event and speaking.

This year the conference will be held in New York City on June 20th and 21st in Convene at 32 Old Slip in downtown Manhattan, just steps from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange.

If you are interested in speaking at the conference, you can respond to the call for papers here. If you’d like to attend, I recommend registering right away at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/querycon-2019-tickets-59900912241.

A huge thanks to everyone who supported Kolide at last year’s event. We can’t wait to see you all at Querycon 2019 and a huge thank you to Trail of Bits for stepping up and making this happen.