After joining the Warwick CyberSoc executive committee in March 2025, I had the wonderful opportunity to help organise and run the society’s student conference, misc0nfig 2025.
TLDR #
I developed much better organisation and communication skills through my time working on the misc0nfig 2025 conference, and am hugely looking forward to helping to run misc0nfig 2026.
Organising the event #
In the run-up to the conference, I helped our society president, Peter Walker, with some of the orgnaisation. This included helping with some of the graphic designs, reaching out to potential speakers (more on that later), ordering items for the conference, and helping plan some aspects of the day itself.
Physical Merchandise #
I was in large part responsible for the logistics of the physical merchandise for the event. I suggested that we should have “goody bags” with physical conference timetable booklets, which Peter supported.
Once we’d decided on what physical items we needed, I researched companies which provided lanyards, booklets, printed paper bags, and more. At points, it was quite difficult; most custom printing sites didn’t have many reviews for individual item types.
After doing that research, and getting final designs for each item (designed mostly by Peter and our marketing officer Sam Kamas), I ordered each item and reached out to our sponsors for additional items to add to the goody bags. In all, I really enjoyed the logistical aspect of organising misc0nfig 2025.
Credit #
I must emphasise that Peter deserves the vast majority of the credit for organising and running misc0nfig 2025. He put an immense amount of work into every aspect of it, it wouldn’t have been as successful as it was without his endless work. In particular he was responsible for arranging every speaker except one.
I’d also like to give a huge thank you to the rest of the exec, in particular our marketing officer Sam Kamas who made some really awesome designs for some of the conference items/merchandise.
Outreach #
In the run-up to the conference, I spent a lot of time reaching out to other student cyber security groups, in an effort to promote misc0nfig to their members. I hugely enjoyed this part of the organisation process; it allowed be to (virtually) meet likeminded cyber security students from all over the country, all of whom were really enthusiastic to chat to me about the event.
The day itself #
Running the conference with the rest of the exec team on the 10th of May was a truly wonderful experience. The feeling of being part of such a fun event, which we’d put so much effort into, was something I’ll treasure for a long time. I really couldn’t have asked for better people to work with, and (largely due to Peter’s tireless work), things went off without any incident.
Especially at the start of the conference before the speaker tracks started, I spent a lot of time speaking to new people who were attending the conference. I will fully admit that I’m quite a shy person by default and this was quite terrifying to begin with, but I enjoyed it so much and I built more confidence as I spoke to more people. Everybody I spoke to seemed to have a wonderful time at the conference, and it was truly lovely to meet so many passionate folks.
Intro/Outro talks #
Most of my “job” for the day was running the second speaker track (with technical assistance from Sam and our external communications officer Artem, as I hadn’t used the lecture capture systems before and they’re built like the controls for a nuclear submarine). At a couple of points this required giving “intro” and “outro” talks for speakers, informing people of who the speaker was, and what was on next.
For the first of these intros, I needed to introduce David Willis-Owen. He was giving a talk on Indirect Prompt Injection which a lot of people wanted to see, so the second speaker track was full to capacity with about 60 people.
I will freely admit that standing up in front of 60 people was, initially, absolutely terrifying. If I’d done that a year ago, I’d likely have feinted or needed to sit down. I found though that if I pushed through that initial panic, it really wasn’t that bad and I was able to give the intro and outro talks without any catastrophic failure. Of the various bits and bobs I did relating to misc0nfig 2025 I’m most proud of this, as public speaking has been a major difficulty for me in the past.
As a brief aside, I reached out to David in the lead-up to misc0nfig 2025 as I’d seen his talk on Indirect Prompt Injection at BSides London. He very kindly agreed to give the talk at misc0nfig and I’d like to say a huge thank you to him for agreeing to come and give such a brilliant talk :)
Pizza #
We ordered 70 pizzas as catering for misc0nfig 2025. Dominoes had to send a sort of pizza convoy, I’m genuinely amazed they had that many pizza bags ready to go. It was such a massive order that Peter had to speak to the regional manager, presumably as it was quite the logisitical operation to get 70 hot pizzas ready to go at once.
final thoughts/lessons learnt #
The planning and organisation for misc0nfig 2025 was immensely stressful at points, as was a lot of the day itself, but it was ultimately one of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever been a part of. I loved helping arrange things, I loved speaking to everybody on the day and helping where I could to make sure folks were having a good time, and I espeically loved working with the rest of the CyberSoc executive team.
I feel that, though it was a bit of a trial by fire, I hugely strengthened my organisational and teamwork skills, and my ability to make quick, pragmatic decisions. I also became a lot more confident in a few important kinds of communication.
Thank you very much to the rest of the exec team, to misc0nfig 2025’s wonderful speakers, and to everybody who came to our first conference and made the day as special as it was.
I can’t wait for the next one :)