The last Strange Loop conference was held September 21-22, 2023 at St. Louis Union Station. The conference is targeted towards developers; the speakers are often sharing their knowledge on new and inventive ways to use technology. At our sponsor booth at Union Station, attendees asked two (okay, three) questions most often:
- What is Latacora? Your name is on the lanyards, and I’m curious to know what you do.
- Why sponsor Strange Loop ?
- Can I take a plant?
The first one isn’t hard for the folks from our team: Latacora is a consultancy that bootstraps security for startups. We have a team of experts helping our clients with most security-related things: application security, cloud security, corporate security, compliance, and more. We also have a team of security architects, cryptographers and project managers supporting our clients. These professionals are equipped with power tools built to make their jobs more efficient and to help our clients improve their security posture.
We also had an opportunity to tell attendees about our newest offerings including Incident Response, wholesale answering of Vendor Security Questionnaires, Managed IT and SIEM.
This information usually led to question 2 - ‘why sponsor Strange Loop?’ Latacorans answered this one a bit differently, here’s why:
- We don’t have any active job postings (though we have added or will add 8 new folks to our team between last month and next month).
- We don’t expect to get many sales leads from the event. Latacora has the benefit of amazing clients who have spread the word about us such that we usually have folks coming to us rather than having my team working on outbound sales efforts.
So why sponsor? My typical response was “for fun” (note - the person writing this is Latacora’s Director of Client Success. I’m not a security engineer, developer, nor an architect). The conference WAS fun. There was laughter in most of the sessions, there were smiles in the halls, and Latacora tried to add to the fun too. We built a booth reminiscent of Peanuts and sat down to provide some expert security help to those who wanted to hear about it.
But it’s more than fun. It’s backing something that makes the world a little smaller and a little weirder. We’re all about doing the right thing when it comes to security and sponsoring Strange Loop seemed like the “right thing” to do to bring developers together to learn about many of the different ways people are applying their skills and ingenuity in not-so-average ways.
Finally, question 3 - ‘Can I take a plant?’. The answer was: “It depends” (we didn’t want anyone to get in trouble at customs!) but mostly, “Yes! Take a plant and a holder! Enjoy!”
If you did not get a plant with our custom pot, fret not! You can print the custom pot yourself using either the 3MF or STL model files.
Thanks to everyone who donated their time by speaking at the event, who put on this great, final Loop, and who stopped by the booth to say ‘hi’. We hope you had good travels; stay strange!
