For many years I wanted to go to a CCC and this year because of different reasons I was finally able to go, this blog post is going to cover my planning and following posts will hopefully follow.
Preparing
There is a log of coverage already how to prepare for a congress. Obviously, you need a ticket. I got my ticket thanks to a co-worker who is a pretty active member of a local chaos group, so was fairly easy (thx stean)
So after getting a ticket, a place to stay needs to be found. In most cases, I run with AirBnB, this time I was unable to find a cosy place nearby so I ended up doing a hotel reservation and I hope this was a good choice.
And last but not least, transportation. The way to go here for me is using german railway services, Deutsche Bahn. There is even a special page from Deutsche Bahn to get a special ticket for a lower price.
Stuff
Of course, going to a conference you need your basic stuff as for every conference/travel, so I will not go into that too much. Especially for the congress, I tagged most of my gear that I plan to bring to the venue with my twitter handle and my domain so that it is easy to find the owner.
In addition to my normal list I packed the following items:
- permanent markers (white/black) – maybe I can help with those
- Magic ties (Amazon link) – I love those things
- Stickers (mostly for FIRST)
- batteries (AA+AAA) because why not.
A water bottle, because @c3himmel asked for it:
A reusable water bottle.
— 36C3 Heaven (@c3himmel) December 17, 2019
There will be water dispensers on #36C3 again, so please bring a bottle to minimize use of one-way plastic bottles. Of course you can also reuse a normal plastic bottle.
Please also note that tap water is drinkable in Germany (and usually tastes good).
Tech
The tech also needs some extra time, in particular, updating every service/application running is critical. As I do not trust the wifi (as with any other wifi) VPN and a backup VPN was tested/updated.
To be able to work on stuff I also freed up some space on the devices, just in case.
Power up batteries, external power supplies and co. I do not want to run out of power.
Further reading
- https://github.com/MacLemon/CongressChecklist really cool list.