A couple of months ago, we were asked “If you had a ZAPCon, how many people do you think would show up?” I think Simon said something like, “I have absolutely no idea.”
Well I will tell you… 2000+ people will register and 1300+ people will show up. And, there will be some great conversations happening during the conference, with more than 700 Discord participants.
There was clearly some pent-up demand around learning about ZAP! Absolutely fantastic.
The First-Ever ZAPCon
This inaugural ZAPCon was all about open source ZAP. Talks ranged from company use cases, to best-practices for empowering software developers with automated security checks, to technical deep dives on how to do things like enhance ZAP with Fuzz-based testing and mobile testing. It was a great range of talks to get users familiar with the power of ZAP, and aligned with how today’s organizations are thinking about automation and shifting security assessment technologies into the hands of software developers.
ZAPCon Attendees
As we look at more data around who attended the conference, I was beyond thrilled to learn that 40% of the audience was from an engineering discipline: DevOps, Software Engineering, Engineering Leadership and QA. This speaks to a very exciting trend of interest by these groups in shoring up the security of their applications BEFORE deploying to production.
StackHawk chose to build its scanner on top of ZAP because it supports this shift. Not only is ZAP the world’s most frequently used application security scanner, but it is also built for enabling automation in CICD. Its best in class functionality allows users to scan modern applications and backing APIs.
In bringing ZAPCon to life, we were excited about the opportunity to invest into the ZAP community and technology. We know how valuable it is to find a partner that is technically aligned with the modern dev process and is interested in building a best in class experience for today’s engineers. We look forward to continuing this partnership by contributing to both the ZAP project and ongoing community efforts.
Thank You’s
As I reflect on the success of this inaugural event, we owe several folks a ton of Thank You’s!
ZAP Core Team – Thank you for building such a great project over the last 10 years. We loved collaborating with you on the conference and appreciate your work in building and cultivating community.
All of our Speakers – We had many excellent talks submitted and it was very difficult to select just a few. Thank you to our speakers for their presentations and staying up late to participate in the Q&A!
Conference Organizing Team from StackHawk – It was a herculean effort for a small team to put together this big of a conference in only 2 months. Fantastic job! Thank you for all of your work!
The Attendees – We had attendees from more than 80 countries. Between the turnout and the engagement in the discord, we had a ton of fun.Thank you for your support!
We’re not through yet! Because there were so many great talk submissions, we’ll be hosting ongoing ZAPCon After Hours. Stay tuned for more details about the next event!
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