HACKERS, TALKS and BEERS

Being a hacker can be lonely and even a bit sad, and that’s what communities are for. There’s one I’m especially fond of (I’ve had something to do with what they do), so I sat down with Eduardo Sánchez, alias Edu Satoé, who showed up looking very corporate and with his beer at hand to talk about Hack&Beers.

Edu is a vocational training teacher and picked up the baton from Miguel Ángel Arroyo, who started this in Córdoba taking inspiration from the Beta Beers. The formula is simple: three speakers, forty-five-minute talks, free entry and a beer covered by the sponsors. From there it has spread to Valencia, Vigo, Bilbao, Málaga, Sevilla, Zaragoza and a long list more, always with a local organiser who makes it happen. We talk about the Hack&Beers Zero Day they put on for the sixth anniversary, the online remakes during the pandemic, the Security High School with as many as a thousand kids and the charity hacking in aid of the Food Bank. He even confessed that once, already three beers in, he dropped his phone right in the middle of a talk about Tor’s hidden nodes.

He wraps up insisting that a hacker is not a computer pirate and that no amount of outreach is ever enough. If you’ve never set foot in a Hack&Beers, this video is a good nudge.